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.

Comments

Interesting Parallel to the Security Discolsure

[Anonymous Coward]

I just saw an EFF press release on this. Felton is quoted as saying "Not only in computer science, but also across all scientific fields, skeptical analysis of technical claims made by others, and the presentation of detailed evidence to support such analysis, is the heart of the scientific method. To outlaw such analysis is to outlaw the scientific method itself." And the article goes on to talk about efforts taken by industry to quash publication of flaws in their security.

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.

this does make sense

[linuxpng]

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because I believe that these companies that have pushed for the DMCA know that is in a dangerous state and might get repealed.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"

Prof. Felten's Version...

[daoine]

If anyone is interested, Prof. Felten has kept a log of what's going on at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/

He's got the RIAA letter, the statement contradicting the RIAA letter, the agreement to the competition, and other such nifty info.

gotta love the twisted logic...

[Anonymous Coward]

From the CNN article:

"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!

But that's not all...

[Monthenor]

The DMCA is far from dead. In fact, it appears to be working overtime. We're all doomed!

Re:Prime Number Theory

[AntiNorm]

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.

Illegal prime numbers do exist already.

Re:They didn't back off...

[sandidge]

Actually, since we're talking about the RIAA here, wouldn't that be "straight from the horse's ass"? :)