Here’s how the scenario will play out :
Macrovision has been testing their “protection” (ha-ha) only on a few disks sold in California. This means that they’ve only been testing market acceptance, not whether or not the technology works. They’ve kept the titles a secret, so that people can’t test the quality or try to break the copy protection. This is a rather silly way to test market acceptance. I mean when was the last time you ever did an A/B test with a CD you purchased with one from out of state?
OK, so once Macrovision gets a label to add SafeAudio to every single CD for a given title around the globe, then people can actually have something to work with. As it stands now, someone could copy a SafeAudio CD but what proof would they have that they didn’t just copy the same title on a CD that didn’t have the “protection” (ha-ha).
There are a lot of audiophiles out there that *really* hate Macrovision (for a variety of reasons, not just SafeAudio). Some of them will attack. They’ll purchase the known SafeAudio titles as soon as they come out (or if possible through advance sales). They’ll immediately copy the disks and post MP3 files on the P2P networks and ask people to spread them even if they don’t like the music.
They’ll also make pirate copies of the disks and then droplift (reverse of shoplift) them into some of the major chains. People will find the pirate copies of the CDs (especially when the originals have been hidden) and take them to the counter where the store managers will discover them and report them to the distributors. Of course this will all be made very public in the press by the droplifters.
To top it all off, the droplifters will then take the original CD that they purchased and return it complaining of pops, hiss, incompatibility, and that they heard there were numerous pirate copies of the disk floating around.
It will only take a couple of stores with a couple of disks to report this and the record companies will FREAK.
