Ah, yes, that's exactly what I had in mind. So they can't prevent circumvention by law, but they can make it as hard as technically possible.
But as Cory Doctorow points out, DRM can never succeed, because in order to sell a working system to your customer, you have to give them the encrypted content, and the decryption engine, and the key (otherwise, they can't use it). But if your customer is your attacker (or your competitor), you just gave your attacker the encrypted content, the decryption engine, and the key, so now they have everything they need to build compatible cartridges...