I read recently in Scientific American about quantum technology being 
used in encryption. Basically the idea is that the individual particles 
used in the transmission signal are charged or spun at the quantum level 
in such a way (without affecting the data itself) that the signal can't 
be intercepted or examined without corrupting this charge or spin and 
marking the signal as compromised. This got me thinking as to whether an 
arbitrary pattern of electrons or light (i.e. an audio file being 
transmitted or stored on a medium) could be "tagged" at the quantum 
level, thus making it unreadable without proper hardware (or at least 
the correct key) and making it useful for DRM purposes. Since the data 
itself does not change (just some normally ignored/discarded 
characteristics of the transmission signal), it would not affect the 
size or performance of the DRM encoded data.

Here's the link:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=swiss-test-quantum-cryptography

Mike

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