National security letters or old boys network or maybe just fat bribes to the right engineer. Could be a requirement for government procurement too, so not a law, just the requirement of a huge customer with deep pockets and negative price sensitivity.
Counterfeiting was a big worry as high-resolution color printers became cheap. They did it motu proprio just like today ~all AI gen services watermark their outputs.
Unlike now, where instead of saying your hypothesis you're just letting every reader come up with what they think is a crazy conspiracy theory and ascribe it to you?
