encoding woes

In Doctorow's article, it amazed me to see the kind of measures certain companies will go to to prevent anything that may possibly be considered making a copy of something for any purpose whatsoever.  If I buy an album, or a DVD, I should be able to make copies for my own personal enjoyment, so that I can, for instance, have a copy at home and a copy at work, or atleast so I can have a backup copy.  Reading some of these examples, I'm surprised I'm allowed to rip cds to my computer at all.  As far as encoding software etc. though, he has one quote about how people get so blindsided in building encoding software that they are incapable of seeing the flaws in it.  Recently I was writing someting for another class about the Enigma machine, and the general principle was the same, the Nazis had so much faith in this device that they couldn't see how their code could possibly get cracked.  Of course, it was, and this was a huge turning point in the war.  Am I comparing digital IP encoders to Nazis? of course not, but for every extremely smart person who can build these crazy encryptions there is someone else who can hack them, and of course, this isn't helpful to the encryptors so that they can take these flaws into consideration, it's illegal.  And such is the stupidity of the whole cat and mouse game.