Shorthand for the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, a legal act providing for penalties against telemarketers who violate certain standards of decent behavior.

What this technology, still being developed, basically does is spy on your computer and report a level of "trust" to content providers. Ostensibly, this is for your own good to provide security, but the software is really targetted at handing control over to the "intellectual property" owners and preventing copying content or , circumventing or reverse-engineering the copy-protection.