As I said on another thread... If you can have an area of memory for these protected styles that cannot be read externally (only written to) then it should be no problem for the user to store his edits in the same area. So I see no impediment to normal use of a protected style.

With the exception of creating an SMF from the style. I guess you COULD, with time and care (LOTS of time!) recreate the style by recording all the chords, in all the divisions, then laboriously stitching it all back together again.

But... here's the whole POINT. If a style creator gets 100% of the sale of his styles, he needs only charge a FRACTION of what they need to now. After all, 1000 sales at $3 a pop is better than 50 sales at $10 a pop (if that, if it gets out fast enough). But, if you can BUY the style for $3, who in their right minds is going to spend a day converting a style into an SMF, and then converting it back into a style?

Protected styles is an idea which's time has come.