his might be a stretch, but it’s worth a look. Apple Inc. has filed for a patent for a Digital Rights Management system for controlling where software can run. It involves injecting a special piece of cipher into an application’s run-time instruction stream that constantly checks and re-checks to see whether it is being run on an authorized platform.

Should all of these checks fail, the software into which the cipher was injected would cease to operate and become inoperable. The patent describes that as being, “transparent to the user and impossible to circumvent.”

This would plus be usable to limit Apple software like Mac OS X to be limited to only Apple hardware, restricting the use of Mac OS X on Mac machines.

On the other hand, and that is simply speculation on my own part, it is possible (though I hope untrue) that that software might additionally be used to certify applications running on the iPhone and iPod touch. While it might be a bit of a stretch, it’s possible.

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