This past October, associate computer science professor Edward Felten and a team of researchers were able to remove digital watermarks from digital audio files — new watermarking technology developed by the industry not in use yet, a feat that would make the people at Napster smile.
However, Felten and his team may not even be able to publish their results.
"Nobody has suggested that it would be unethical or dangerous for us to publish our results," Felten said in an e-mail. "Unfortunately, it may be illegal."
The problem may be the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a recent piece of legislation dealing with intellectual property.
The parts of the DMCA that concern Felten and his group are what are commonly called "anti-circumvention provisions," Felten said. The first of these provisions makes it illegal to distribute a device that can be used to bypass a technological system that is intended to protect copyrighted material.
A digital watermark is essentially a digital fingerprint that is inserted into an audio file. It identifies the file as copyrighted to any digital music player, such as an mp3 player, and prevents unauthorized people from copying and playing it.
If companies are successful in their use of this new copyrighting technology, they would be able to prevent copyright infringement such as music pirating, which some accuse Napster of encouraging.
Digital watermarks are difficult to remove because they are embedded directly into the audio data. To modify the watermark is to change the music itself.
Felten and his team developed a technique with which digital audio players would not recognize the digital watermarks on music files. The music player would then be able to copy and play the copyrighted music file without significantly decreased audio quality.
Felten did not develop this technology for the purpose of making it easier to pirate music. Instead, he and his team cracked the digital watermark technology in response to a challenge issued by the Secure Digital Music Initiative — an association of companies in the music and electronics industries. The prize for defeating the challenge was $10,000.
SDMI — which Felten describes as "the record companies' response to the Napster phenomenon" — issued this challenge in order to discover whether or not their digital watermark technology was unbreakable.
And Felten's team did just that. "Our research raises very serious doubts about whether SDMI's technological approach will work," he said.
Felten's team had the choice to either take the prize money or to publish their findings.
Felten and his group decided when they started not to accept the money. "We decided from the beginning to forgo the prize so that we could discuss our results," he said.
However, the researchers are now wary of publishing their research because it may violate the DMCA, even though they themselves do not feel that their research is controversial.
A federal court in New York ruled that a computer program, even if it is not in a form that could be directly executed, can be considered a "device" under the anti-circumvention provisions. If someone were to publish the text of the program, it might be a violation of the DMCA.
The court ruled further that it may be illegal to even describe how a technological system — like the digital watermarks, for example — might be circumvented.
Felten said one of his biggest concerns was that the New York court's interpretation could make public discussion of the weaknesses of any technology illegal, if under any circumstances someone had used that technology to protect copyrighted material.
"The effect would be to outlaw the publication of research results in many areas of computer science," he said.
Felten said his group's intentions were never to violate the law. "We are not advocating copyright infringement, and we never intended to publish any tools for infringement or even recipes for making such tools," he said.
He said the main problem is that the DMCA has been interpreted too broadly. "As the courts have interpreted it so far, [it] imposes an overly broad restriction on speech, so even our relatively uncontroversial results might be illegal to publish," he said.
The penalty for a first offense violation of the DMCA is a fine of up to $500,000 and up to five years in prison.
"We certainly feel that our freedom of speech has been violated," Felten said. "It is hard to understand that the same legal system that allows people to publish the instructions for making a hydrogen bomb would prohibit discussion of watermarking technologies because those technologies might someday be used to protect copyrights."
Their research was conducted this past October over a period of three weeks. Felten's collaborators included electrial engineering graduate students Scott Craver, Pat McGregor and Min Wu, a Rice University professor, two Rice students and a researcher at Xerox.
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