OK, I'm going to take a shot at this. If I'm way off, somebody tell me.
The Internet has [has had] a problem. When you buy something with a credit card, all the information is encrypted for transmission to the merchant. The problem is that the merchant then decrypts this information, and for some period of time (sometimes indefinitely), your credit card information is on the merchant's computer(s), which are sometimes vulnerable to being hacked.
Now, it is my
conjecture that JRiver is avoiding this trap by not keeping your credit card information on their servers for very long. After processing the transaction, instead of deleting the info, they encrypt it into your registration file. This is presumably for some future use, perhaps for buying updates; I can't imagine that they are using credit card numbers as identifiers.
There is a company called RG Tecq that has been addressing this credit card problem for some time now. I own stock in RG Tecq. They are a self-proclaimed 'talented team of International Research and Development Security experts and "White Hat" Hackers with a vision of creating a company to be a leading provider of secure encryption systems and technology'. The background of these 'world-class security experts' includes military security work, for example, on co-founder Rogel: 'During the Gulf War, Mr. Patawaran was issued Top Secret Clearances by the United States Department of Defense in order to develop Electronic Countermeasures for the United States Air Force.' They also have music experience, for example, Greg Chapman 'had been a prominent music industry executive and an early innovator in applying Internet technology to the recording industry'.
They have an online demo of their credit card technology on their website under products. The concept is pretty much summed up by this link:
Their website is at
http://www.rgtecq.com.
JimH may want to talk to RG Tecq about their credit card security products, and perhaps about their megaplayer product, 'a secure media player designed to protect digital media from download piracy and peer-to-peer file sharing'.
Scronch