Back when they were still trying to partner with Neil "Pono" Young, they talked openly about how the format would enable downloads locked to a specific device or user key. Without the key, playback would be allowed at a degraded quality level as set by the owner of the content, including the possibility for no unauthorised playback at all. Such features are also the topic of one of the patents filed by Bob Stuart and Peter Craven (an apt name, btw), and least some such functionality has been in the MQA decoder since the start.
Another way of looking at MQA is as a counterpart to the idiotic blank media tax the music industry has bullied many governments into imposing. If they can't stop you copying the files, the next best thing is to make you pay the rights holders in some other way. The media tax makes you pay for storing the files, even if you never touch a pirate copy. MQA makes you pay for playing the files regardless of you how acquire them.
It may be of interest, but I had a conversation with someone who shared a little insight.
Im not 100% sure how much of this is already known.
But, Bob Stuart apparently created a new format originally for what was the Ponoplayer.
After it became apparent that the format would be somewhat locked down/proprietary, Neil Young basically told Bob to shove it.
Bob then later began marketing it standalone as MQA.
Additionally, and I'm intentionally leaving details out for now until a few things are confirmed but, it might actually be the case that MQA doesn't have the full intellectual property rights to their product and the way they are currently operating may not be legal.
GPL is an interesting area....
Yes, this was all discussed in Neil et al.’s
To Feel the Music:
“Stuart had been attending our monthly development meetings at Neil’s ranch as the team’s audio expert. But as we progressed with the development of the player, it was Gallatin who designed the player’s electronics, while Stuart provided suggestions and comments along the way. Stuart’s main contribution was to be his software.
In these meetings Stuart would describe his software in general terms with little specificity. He explained it as something very complex that involved encoding and decoding using both software and hardware. But he was always reluctant to provide specific details about when we’d see it.
I could sense that Neil was becoming frustrated and impatient, because that software was critical to completing and testing the player. It was not only Neil; the entire development team had begun to wonder whether we’d ever see anything. It made us all very nervous.”
“
To signify that a file was authentic, Bob Stuart came up with the idea to put a blue light on the Pono player that would go on when a Pono recording was being played, letting the user know that the recording was Pono: the highest resolution, a pure, unaltered file.”
“Finally, in our November monthly meeting, Stuart said he was ready to discuss the terms for Pono using the software. Hamm flew to the UK to meet with him and the investors in Meridian: the Richemont Group, a Switzerland-based company that owns a number of European luxury fashion brands.
The terms they proposed to Hamm included
monthly payments, royalties for each player sold, more stock, and no exclusivity. The terms were much more onerous than Pono could afford and
made no business sense based on normal industry standards. Not only would the software not be exclusive to Pono, but it also restricted what Pono could do with it. For example, if Pono was sold or licensed its player to be built or sold by another company, then his technology could not be included.
During these negotiations, Hamm explained our economics and tried to negotiate a more favorable arrangement. Discussions and negotiations continued for several months and included Hamm, Elliot, Neil, Cohen, and Stuart and his investors, but they never were able to come to an agreement.
When I interviewed Stuart for this book, he thought that Pono management had been unreasonable by not accepting his terms, because of the value his software would provide. Stuart felt its value was much greater than what Pono believed it to be.
Stuart’s software eventually became the basis for a proprietary compression technology called MQA.”
“
Charley dismissed Stuart’s technology as solving a problem that didn’t exist and therefore no longer needed solving. We had no reason to shrink the files at all, since memory and file size were not the issues they had been years earlier. Like Neil, he was opposed to a new proprietary music format that added new restrictions to the music files and was controlled by for-profit companies.”
“Bob Stuart contacted our lawyer, Rick Cohen, and said we were disclosing confidential information on our Kickstarter website. He was referring to an image of the inside of the Pono player that showed the prototype circuit board, including the programmable memory chip that was to store his software—the software that hadn’t arrived.
I thought his complaint was unfounded because there was nothing that was proprietary in the image that would indicate anything related to his technology, and nothing that he designed. In fact, his backing out of our arrangement required us to design around the chip in order to get our early prototypes to work.
The chips simply just sat on the boards unused.”
...DJ/producers... 
