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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.
I'm astounded that even the EFF reduces all human activity to, "consumption" I did not donate money to the EFF to be called a consumer and if anything would help the debate about our rights in the electronic age (EFF's alleged mission) it would be to recognize the rights we are looking for are citizen's rights, not consumers.
I just finished writing my email to Cindy Cohn a the EFF (cindy@eff.org), and I encourage others to follow-suit.
Feel free to use:
Thanks for all your work for the EFF - I recently became a member and I'm pleased with the EFF's support of the Dimitry & Felten cases.
I'm a little non-plussed though, to see the EFF using language that, IMO, do nothing to help the world recognize the need for ciziten's rights in cyberspace. To wit:
> "This is where the EFF lives and where many of you live -- we live on > the cutting edge," she said. "We're looking at problems that actually > haven't hit home to the consumer yet. That's where we always try to be > ... until everyone else catches up."
I'm a great many things in my life, but "consumer" is right near the bottom of it. I consume what I need to consume in order to do the things that are higher on the list, like be a good citizen and contribute to my community. If we allow ourselves to be called consumers, we will only be able to fight for "consumers rights". I don't want consumers rights, I want citizen's rights. I want to be recognized as a living, thinking, articulate member of society, not a consumer.
I know it may seem like a minor point, and I know that "consumer" has become popular media slang for the common man, but I don't think it's a positive trend and I feel that it's a trend that will only hurt the causes that EFF stands for.
I humbly suggest the EFF do justice to the people it claims to fight for and call them citizens in all public comment or releases.
Thanks for you time.
Felten and company have a lawsuit pending over the DMCA's chilling effect on free speech. But how much credibility is the judge going to give the case now that Felten has published his findings? We all know the RIAA isn't going to do anything to Felten while the lawsuit is an issue, because they don't want to give the other side any ammunition for their case.
But now that Felten has presented his findings, it seems to me there's a reasonable chance that the judge will ask "so how exactly has the DMCA proven to be chilling, given that you've presented your work?".
Felten may still win his case, but it seems to me that by presenting his findings he's reduced the odds of winning significantly...
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
I'm waiting for someone to use RSA or something similar for copy protection purposes. Then, it will be illegal to do research on prime number theory, because discussing efficient algorithms to factor large numbers will be a violation of the DMCA. Last I heard, this was a semi-hot topic in math research. I for one hope the DMCA makes research illegal, because the media and the public will be MUCH more upset at that than a few hackers who can't get free music anymore. Also, scientists have a much better record of making their voices heard than Russian political prisoners^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h computer programmers.
I would've expected news like that out of the communist bloc just a few years ago, but not here and not now.
what was the RIAA's real intent? Did they simply retract their threat to sue for the sake of PR, or what it something deeper?
The bluff smells of censorship, IMO. It is a warning to every other research group who will walk the fine line that is the DMCA that they are being watched. The scrutiny serves the role of censorship, and the threat of legal action will remain until the researchers ask if they can publish.
I seriously don't know what is worse. Not being able to publish at all, or having to pander to the legally privileged (thanks to the DMCA) and beg "Please, please, can I publish my paper?". In either case, Big Brother wins.
If you circumvent the DMCA to read a document about how to reverse engineer something (circumventing the DMCA yet again), do you get thrown in jail twice?
Was it that SDMI is dead as a doornail and they therefore know Felten's study can't do any damage to their cash flow, or that the publicity was so bad? I think we can rule out altruism as their motivation...
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Someone thumbed his nose at copyright protection Wednesday without getting arrested, indicted or sued.
Finally, someone sees cracking encryption as something other than a hacker threat. There are more uses for such activity, such as education, to see how the encryption works.
Let's hope that this is a precedent, since that government is unlikely to repeal this law.
"These are hypotheticals. We have no idea what he may or may not write," said RIAA spokesman Jano Cabrera.
That sentence says everything that is wrong with the attitudes of those wielding the DMCA as a weapon. It should not matter what Professor Felton or any other person (academic or not) should write - so long as it is not covered under the dangerous restrictions (i.e. national secrets, "Fire" in a crowded theater, etc.) Freedom of Speech is at issue here and someone's ENTERTAINMENT copyright does not deserve as much protection as an intellectual discourse. It appalls me that apparently, entertainment profits are more important than scientific knowledge.
Don't just complain - DO something about it!
Julien Stern lectured at SummerCon this year about compromising the SMDI watermarking scheme. SummerCon said they would post the talk at some time in the future at www.summercon.org. It was interesting to hear the further they got into the challenge, the more restrictions that were put up to prevent them from publishing the work.
Sounds like someone is trying to get most of the population on side ('normal' piracy isn't so bad), while leaving the way open to single out an individual. "Ohh. He's (he = computer programmer who just wrote a CSS clone) a digital pirate. He must be really bad. Let's put him in gaol."
Meanwhile the bulk of the population feels secure and does nothing, as they are 'normal pirates'.
Probably the journalist isn't even conscious of using this term, as they read it in an RIAA press release.