i think its crazy how you are all planning on hacking into these discs, the albums out in a few days, just wat

Im kind of excited about the fact of this album being like the old days of getting it on the release date. Well done with the watermark. Bring on the 23

Yeah buying FOTL was excellent for me...I went to a midnight opening of the local Golden Discs here in Dublin and quite a few of the more ardant fans turned up. Got a giant bus-stop ad display sized poster of the album cover...still on my wall to this day

I'm more than happy to wait

Wrong. You CAN do it, and it's actually a pretty interesting process. The watermark is, on theory, very easy to implement. All it does is modify some frequencies that are "invisible" to the human ear, so the actual sound of the track doesn't change at all. Anyone can do this using Sound Forge, for example, if he knows the right patterns used to add the details. Decoding the freq pattern should also be easy, just think of it as a morse code.
It's a matter of time before this "protection" stuff is removed, because, on the other end, the record companies DO need some piece of software to decode the encoded watermarks. Once that program is online, say goodbye to this "piracy nightmare".

But can you take the person who has the mp3 file to court?

There has never been a case in this country I am in, so would be a test case and therefore very very dodgy ground for a label to attempt it

Say for example that one of the promo copies leaked on the net, who is the bigger criminal?
The leaker or the downloader?

Who is more likely to be caught?

What punishment would come of it from just one album?

At what cost would a record label take a person who illegally downloaded one album?

Hahahaha! The CD has been watermarked for a reason! To stop impatient shits like yourselves from spreading it about. Just be patient for fuck sake, there's not that long to wait!