Slightly OT:
Remember how a few years back, when SACD authoring became available, we were discussing the SACD ref problem and resulting implications?
To recap: With SACD, there is absolutely no way of making a direct reference disc. If there's no way for a client to sign off an actual ref, who is liable if there's a problem with the replicated disc content?
I recently had just that. A insanely unlikely but significant error leading to a bad pressing.
Seeing that neither the client nor the replicator were able to identify an error (well, the plant actually could have easily caught it, but we all know that plants don't do QC anymore), it seems clear that liability lies with the authoring party. However, business liability insurance won't cover it, because technically, you didn't damage the pressed discs' content, you only 'damaged' the content of the master, which is the product that you are actually manufacturing / selling. You have no legal relation to the replication order, which is between the client and the pressing plant only. So.... who pays for a re-pressing?
In our case, it was only 2000 discs, so the damage was manageable (of course we paid for the re-pressing). But what if it had been 20,000 discs? And what if the resulting delay in manufacturing had caused further logistical costs (or losses) down the line? How can you cover yourself against these risks?
Does anyone have an answer to this? Has anyone had a similar problem?
PS: I guess this relates to this topic a bit too, anytime you give your client a ref that is not in the format of the actual product to be, you're taking on additional liability. The format differences between DVD-A vs. AC3 on DVD-V vs. DTS-CD could be enough to cause a problem here (think of LFE, surround levels, encoding differences, etc).
