[logfromblammo]

Much like one cannot have a patented trade secret. The grant of patent requires disclosure, and using the court system to publicly resolve disputes.

If one uses technical means to protect information, parent poster proposes that courts should decline to protect it under the copyrights regime as well. Certainly, they should not protect both the information and whatever technical device is used to do private enforcement.

You can either use the public protection regime, or your own private protection device, but not both.

The issue at hand is that copyright implicitly includes an agreement to allow the work to pass into public domain after the copyright term expires. Technology that prevents that is anathema to the agreement. At the least, such schemes should fail-open, such that archived copies may be read as plaintext when the copyright term expires.