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Felten & Co. Present SDMI Findings, Finally
chill writes: "Princeton scientist Dr. Edward Felten and his colleagues presented their paper entitled 'Reading Between the Lines: Lessons From an SDMI Challenge' at the Usenix Security Symposium. CNN has an article.
This is the paper that the RIAA threatened legal action (DMCA) over in the past, if he made his findings public. They have since backed off their threats."
Newsforge is carrying a piece on the same thing that goes into a bit more depth, and links to coverage of yesterday's press conference, and the Standard has a decent piece on it as well.
They're right. The RIAA never threatened him with direct action. The letter only said something along the lines of "your actions could subject you to legal action under the rules of the DMCA". Big difference, hmm? "I'm not saying I'll kill you if you come on my property. It's just that if you come on my property, you might...ummm...die a violent death." The RIAA's claim that no threats were made is infuriatingly insulting.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
The stance being taken by the industry to "protect" copyright is amazingly similar to the idea discussed earlier that publishing security flaws helps the Black Hats. If nobody is allowed to talk about it, nothing bad can happen. Of course, in this case, we (the end users) probably want something bad to happen to the corporations. But not talking isn't a solution to either problem.
How much bad publicity is it for a company when they dare you to break their copy protection then threaten a university when it was accomplished and they wanted to publish their findings. This is just typical CYA because I believe that these companies that have pushed for the DMCA know that is in a dangerous state and might get repealed. They want to hold on as long as possible to it and use it for the right fight. It just saddens me that our government "for the people and by the people" has been substituted with "for the corperations and by the corperations"
I take it as a given that the good Dr. Felten withdrew the initial paper because he could then show clear evidence of a chilling effect. Now, of course, the lawsuit proceeds apace, but Felten can of course present his paper without interference from the RIAA because it would further Felten's claims and provide even more clear evidence that the DMCA was, in fact, unconstitutional (not that any thinking person who doesn't accept big media's spin on things needs more clarification on the matter).
To continue to go after Felten would strengthen the case against the DMCA and, speed the day, the eventual dismantlement of this egregiously rotten piece of legislation.
Yay Felten et al. Thank goodness he's on our side.
Protege Posterioram Tuam
"Shortly before the group was due to present its paper at an April conference in Pittsburgh, a lawyer for SDMI and the RIAA sent Felten a letter telling him he could face legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law that bars efforts to defeat copyright-protection technologies.
The lawyer, Matthew Oppenheim, has since backed away from the letter, saying the SDMI had an obligation to protect the trade secrets of the companies that developed the anti-piracy technology but never intended to sue."
So if they "never intended to sue", what the hell did they mean by "could face legal action under the [DMCA]?" Oh wait - maybe they thought they'd just drop a dime on him - give the FBI a call and have him arrested at the conference!
no, they can still sue the RIAA for DELAYING the release of their findings. And that is what they were suing about in the first place.
Free as in *BUUURP!*
The problem is we've had too many multi-million-dollar judgments against corporations because some loon spilled coffee on her lap or because some idiot couldn't read the Surgeon General's Warning. These are cases where the individuals themselves were the ones who should have been held accountable, but the corporations ended up getting the blame.
As a result, corporations bend over backwards to cover their own asses in these cases with all kinds of legalese. The DMCA, the Felten case, Sklyarov, and all of this nonsense are a result of this; since individuals have gotten judgments they didn't deserve, corporations have been able to get more protection than they really needed.
It's not just "Oooh, evil corporations are taking over everything!" Individual citizens failed to be accountable for their own actions, and convinced uneducated juries that the world owed them a living. As a result, companies have gone ape-shit to try to protect themselves, and now this practice has gotten out of hand.
There's a historical cause behind what we're seeing today. It isn't "us" against "them."
It's also not a zero-sum game, where one group gains freedoms at the expense of others.
Ok. Let me get this straight.
Company copyrights a technological form of encryptiong.
Somebody breaks it. Company has the legal right to sue.
so.... if I create an encryptiong alg. copyright it. and then use it to send illegal info. Does the FBI have the right to try and break it. or can I sue good ol Uncle Sam???
Just curious.
some of those sound pretty ridiculous. Got any references? My doubts are raised because I live near Claymont Delaware and follow the paper and local news carefully. I never heard of such a case....
The SDMI nastygram that started this was a pretty vanila knee-jerk threat. It is the type of threat that in most cases can be made without fear of the consequences since the chances are that the target will simply roll over at the first hint of a threat.
What the SDMI lawyers certainly did not expect was that making threats would land them as defendants in a lawsuit that would be diffciult for them to either defend or disengage from. Essentially the only way to avoid a costly fight is to tell the court to vacate the anti-trafficing provisions in the DMCA that the RIAA paid so much to Senatorial campaign coffers to buy.
What the SDMI and RIAA failed to grasp is that Felten and co are much less interested in the ability to publish one paper than the larger principle. There is no real incentive for Felten and co to accept an out of court settlement.
In the process the suit is likely to issue the coup de gras to SDMI. The group has been spectacularly unsuccessful in meeting a goal to agree on a standard by Christmas 1999. Only one of the vendors has released an SDMI compliant player and they modified it to play unrestricted MP3s pretty quickly when nobody would buy it.
The only reason SDMI is continuing is sheer inertia and the fact that the manufacturers who could not give a monkey's for the interests of the labels would rather participate in an obvious failure of a group than withdraw and risk it being replaced.
I attended only one SDMI meeting and told my company to steer well clear of the loosers. The work was chaotic with deadlines set to fit unrealistic schedules that would inevitably fall apart leading to delay. Worse however was the fact that while 150 engineers were working on one set of specs in open meetings a closed group of 8 people were hacking out a private deal in a back room that entirely negated the rest of the groups work.
Bet you wish you thought of this nym first