I'm looking for an idea. An idea that can--in some form--allow me to pepper my Perl code with hard-to-remove copyright comments all over the place so that it's almost illegible and is difficult to remove using a regex--with the code still being executable.
As one of the commenters has pointed out below the following trick can be applied to any such normal technique:
perl -MO=Deparse obfuscated.pl > plaintext.pl
Perhaps someone here can find a work around.