Info for anyone interested.
On the protection side of things, I believe the discs were duplicated individually and certain fields written during formatting, which would vary slightly between formats and therefore be unique for each disc formatted, were then hard-coded into the duplicate copy and if the values stored didn't match the values in the fields, the disc would refuse to run. Copying using *BACKUP or *COPY wouldn't work either, as the exact field values on each new disc wouldn't match what was stored on the original. Something ingenious like that anyhow.