However, all the participants in those meetings were engineers. Although they came from 10 different companies, they were all more or less on the same side. Unlike adjudicating the merits of competing storage technologies, copy protection is not a purely technical issue, because no purely technical solution exists. Bell likens the situation to money counterfeiting. But it will never be impossible, because the incentive and reward for breaking the scheme is so great.
Technical solutions have therefore to be buttressed by legislative barriers.
The scheme that Lambert and his colleagues described to Bell, called the Copy Generation Management System, was very simple. Every recording would have attached to it a simple two-bit code that could be read by every recording device. If both bits were 1s, the device would simply refuse to make a copy. If one bit was a 1 and the other a 0, the device would make a single copy but would change the attached code to two 1s, and hence prevent subsequent copying. If both bits were 0s, unlimited copies could be made.