Note that under this scenario most “software patents” would probably have very short lifetimes.

Unless you accept some kind of divine influence, say a soul, the psychology of a situation is merely a computational relationship we simply don’t understand yet. My intuition is that this view renders the point of the whole article moot.

I don’t know much about the specifics of the crack except for the typical colloquial explanation that the keys for decrypting the data were pulled out of memory. I can only surmise that since decrypting such massive amounts of video data in real time necessitates that programs be highly optimized. What would should optimized decryption code do? Keep the key in cache. Since the rest of the cache data is constantly changing as new frames of data are decoded, identifying static memory locations during video playback may sufficiently winnow down the number of possible key locations in memory.

I’m guessing this is the case, and if it is, we have the unique situation where optimization defeats DRM by limiting opportunities for key obfuscation. Of course even with faster resources, obfuscation methods (which all DRM schemes boil down to) aren’t a panacea. They will just signal the continued arms race between open and closed source developers.

Yes, but how many self-referential formulas are there?