> This doesn't seem like a blocking issue to me. The drive would report _something_ > back whether the disk is damaged, or even missing from the drive entirely. The copy > protection would simply rely on getting what it expects back from the disk drive > controller which could be provided via emulation if some kind of standard is agreed > upon to represent this.
The hole in a disk protections work best if they force you to write to the disk & expect the write to fail only in the hole. I'm pretty sure that exists, so specifying where the media is damaged is going to be necessary for that.