Right, you could easily bypass it by cutting away the "folded" encoded track, which kind of defeats the point for mqa for the end user (assuming the encoded track contains some kind of magic that makes the music better), so it's fairly safe to assume most people will just leave the files alone.
I have no technical knowledge on how MQA does its thing (and to be fair I am pretty anti digital full stop - vinyl sounds better than Cd - CD sounds better than file based digital
), I come at this from an overall IT perspective and how to protect data within public infra (secure the payload, not the file) - so is this enfolded track stored as meta data with MQA then? What happens if it is removed? A good way to protect data is to use something you know, with something variable/uncontrollable, and merging the first with the second such that the first is undetectable. Digital media is a pretty good variable source to use with something you know, but if MQA stores the bit people know as metadata, I give the format a very limited shelf life before someone breaches it.
In general digital data protection today, it is more about how you protect the "bit that you know" - this is generally a key of some sort, and that is the bit that must be protected...of course, any access to the data means that before payload access you must be provided to the key somehow...this is where it gets interesting.
I think either MS or Google will release the first scalable solution (MS Azure tokenised digital rights first release comes in March or April I think) - it won't work properly for the first few releases, but once it does then media digital content providers will have a sure fire way of controlling who can access their data.
However, anyone who can access that data, can then quite easily clone it and re-release it without any protection. So how do you protect your payload to ensure that if it is cloned, the end result payload is lower quality/inferior somehow? Legally, a digital signature of course - but practically, that does not not work with digital audio/video payload - there are enough of us out there that just don't care about the legal aspect. But if you knew that the best quality was only available via a paid source, wow - you'd be set for life
I never really followed MQA until now, I will now go and try to inform myself what it is and how it works.
Digital rights/protection is an incredibly important and interesting subject currently IMO - the future has us storing all data files in a big public cloud (let's call it the Internet), and then restricting who can access the payload within those files. This is a sea change to previous approach of protecting access to the data files in the first place, which while the talk of protecting access to the data rather than the perimeter has been corporate security buzz wording for several years now, there is no end-end scalable solution that enables this ideal.
When it does it will have unexpected impact methinks