Music industry warns Felten

A team of computer science researchers from Princeton and Rice universities is now under the shadow of the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a consortium of over 180 companies from the communications, recording and technology industries.

On April 9, University computer science professor Edward Felten, a member of the team, received a letter from the Recording Industry Association of America, speaking on behalf of the SDMI, urging the team not to publish the method it devised to break the SDMI encryption technology.

"We wanted to understand the technology, and we wanted to understand how well it worked," Felten said.

Last year, the team participated in a competition held by the SDMI in which participants were asked to find a way to defeat several forms of digital watermarking — a technology that can be used to prevent unauthorized copying of digital media, such as MP3s. Verance, a member of the SDMI, is currently using the technology in its products.

Felten's team was able to break the watermark, but is now afraid to release its results.

"The disclosure of any information that might assist others to remove this watermark would seriously jeopardize the technology and the content it protects," the letter from the RIAA stated.

It continued, "Such disclosure . . . would constitute a violation of the agreement and would subject your research team to enforcement actions under the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] and possibly other federal laws."

Felten and the team decided to cancel their plans to explain their findings at the International Information Hiding Workshop held in Pittsburgh last week.

"We were disappointed, and people who were at the conference were also disappointed," Felten said.

In a statement he read at the conference, Felten explained, "Litigation is costly, time-consuming and uncertain, regardless of the merits of the other side's case."

Felten maintained in an interview that his team is not legally bound to abide by the wishes of the RIAA and the SDMI. "There's nothing in the click-through agreement that prevents us from publishing the paper."

Jano Cabrera, communications director of the RIAA, said, however, "The letter — contrary to what has been reported — did not threaten to bring any legal action against professor Felten or his coauthors."

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Verance, on the other hand, has threatened the team with legal action, Felten said.

"Those engaged in such academic pursuits bear a responsibility to conduct their research and publish its results in an ethical and lawful manner," Verance chairman David Leibowitz said in a statement.

"Many people view this as an attempt of a company to suppress research results that they don't like," Felten said. University computer science professor Andrew Appel is one of those people.

Appel — who teaches a freshman seminar focusing on the effects of law over speech and technology — is wary of the growing power of the "copyright industrial complex" over scientific research.

At Monday's faculty meeting, Appel proposed that a faculty committee be created to explore how the University can defend academic work from threats of censorship and legal action by commercial organizations.

The motion passed unanimously, with the support of President Shapiro and Dean of the Faculty Joseph Taylor.

Though the motion does not address the current conflict between the SDMI and the research team, Appel said the committee would prepare the University to be more proactive on similar issues in the future.

"The committee could encourage the University and the Office of Legal Counsel to be more aggressive in defending academic freedom," Appel said.

"My general view," Felten said, "is that watermarking technology now is not mature enough for the application that the SDMI had in mind . . . It makes sense for the SDMI to go back to the drawing board."