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RE: Copy Protection?

Hello Fitzcarraldo,

I'm unsure if you've been keeping up with the discussion on this topic at the Computer Audiophile forums under the "MQA is Vaporware" thread. Bob Stern posted an interesting US patent application from Bob Stuart, originally assigned to Meridian and now sold to MQA.

"Regardless of Warner's present intention, Meridian's streaming format is specifically designed to implement DRM copy protection. The US counterpart of their 2013 patent application is at:

https://www.google.com/patents/US20160005411

A few key points from the patent application:

Streamed music played without decoding will have a "degraded quality" that "can be controlled over a wide range from an imperceptible impairment to a significant impairment" [0016]. The exemplary degradation technique results in audio quality similar to MP3 [0108]. The degraded version of the streamed music should be of sufficiently poor quality that theft is of no concern [0112].

The customer's decoder can reverse the degradation dependent on an user-encrypted song key (claims 4 and 11-13, [0116]-[0117]). The song key is encrypted so that it can be unlocked only with a customer's personal user key, and can also require a secret device key and/or "tracing information" (claims 5-10, [0137]-[0140])."

There's no need for me to speculate on this - you can either do it for yourself or read the many thoughtful posts over there. But it's pretty obvious that there wouldn't be any reason to spend many tens of thousands of dollars on a patent that wasn't intended to be used.

Cheers,
Charles Hansen


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