[bityard]

The FCC regulations don't take "might as well" into consideration, they only prohibit "messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning". So, ACTUAL encryption, not EFFECTIVE encryption, however you want to define that.

Since PACTOR is not "encryption" in the sense that the algorithm may be generally known but the secret key is not, it doesn't run afoul of the regulations. There's nothing in the regulations saying that the modulation or encoding used must be open or publicly available somehow. At best, it might be a gray area if the person/company providing it selectively decided who to sell it to.

And according to wikipedia: "Pactor modes other than level 1 (P1) are not open source,[14][15] but are publicly documented[16] and can be monitored and decoded easily over the air by third parties using free Raspberry Pi software ("PMON for Raspberry Pi")[17] or PMON utility on the modem itself.[18]"

All of THAT being said, I would certainly be in favor of a rule change that only allowed fully-published non-patented codecs on the amateur bands. That would of course wipe out all of the existing VHF/UHF digital modes since (nearly?) all of them use AMBE which must be licensed.