Not necessarily only on the machine downloaded on.
I guess it all depends on whether or not you can extract from WMA Lossless.
I know I can, and so can a lot of others too.
It's as good as MLP, to be honest. WMA Pro is genuinely lossless, and it can be done right off a Nuendo timeline.
Additionally, there are free encoders for WMA from Microsoft. I will check and find out if there are also decoders, and if the free one will encode to WMA Pro Lossless.
To be blunt, why worry - with Music Servers rapidly gaining ground - I am waiting for my new Cambridge Audio 640H file server, it seems to me that as long as Multichannel is being released, it's a good thing. DRM is something we have to live with, and with both BRD and HD-DVD (always assuming the precious bandwidth is not squandered on pointless video and even more pointless "interactive" bollocks, which will leave no room at all for HR MC Audio) internet connections will be mandatory, as any attempts to hack the player or play a hacked or ripped disc will cause the player to become inoperative until it gets reset by a service centre.
So, to my mind, I have no problems with WMA lossless.
I will not be on my own here, but then again I can forsee a lot of problems too - for one thing, it limits to PC or File Servers like the Cambridge unit only. This is not right as I am the first to complain about releases on SACD only. It limits choice. I won't buy SACD at all, and a lot won't go near WMA for much the same reasons I suspect.
If a format is to gain widespread success it needs to be accessible and limiting this to PC users only is a bit insulting to our fruit loving friends.