[Elspode]

Well, having just read up on everything I could find about the technology, I still don't freaking understand it. It does seem that, if it works, you could still do a digital capture on the analogue stream output by a CD player, and produce a fairly good copy that way, but it would take a lot more time and effort, plus it wouldn't be an exact digital copy.

From what I read, all subsequent digital copies of the protected CDs would carry with them the protection, which limits the number of copies which can be made from any one CD, and also limits how many times the copies can be played. I cannot imagine how this is done, though, and I'm still not sure why one could not rip the CD-A track to mp3.