I suppose what MQA and anyone in the music biz who wants to use them intend isn't as important as what they can do, and while it's still early days it sure would suck if the biz managed to leverage this into some sort of real monopoly.
But for whatever it's worth, I do actually wonder whether monopoly was on the minds of the MQA folks.
If I were an intellectual property attorney (I am the latter, but not in the former field) with the MQA boys in front of me, I might say something like the following:
"OK, you're telling me you want to protect your special sauce [MQA is essentially a certain configuration or type of configuration of the interpolation filters for digital audio, that you could loosely view, conceptually speaking, as one type of alternative to the megacomboburrito filter], but you're saying it will take about a New York minute for everyone to figure out your filters down to the coefficients as soon as you release this. Therefore, what I'd advise in order to get the max legal protection for your baby is to (1) attach these filters to a piece of hardware and get a patent; and (2) throw in a little cryptography somewhere - compression/decompression stages are traditional places." Bada-boom....
So this easily could be the result of legal advice in response to the question, "How can we make some money from this without everyone and his brother immediately copying it?" Again, not that this makes a huge difference if the result is an actual monopoly, but it is a possible alternative to the pure Dr. Evil interpretation of the MQA folks' motivation. (I know, what fun is that?)
