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[FYI] (Fwd) Felton - Is the RIAA running scared?




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Date sent:      	Fri, 27 Apr 2001 12:36:20 -0400
Send reply to:  	Law & Policy of Computer Communications
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From:           	Richard Forno <rforno@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Subject:        	Felton - Is the RIAA running scared?
To:             	CYBERIA-L@LISTSERV.AOL.COM

Is the RIAA running scared? A fumbled attempt to silence a Princeton
professor backfires on the recording industry.

http://salon.com/tech/log/2001/04/26/felten/print.html

- - - - - - - - - - - - By Janelle Brown

April 26, 2001 | In a move that shows just how wary of free speech the
recording industry has become, a Princeton computer science professor
announced Thursday that he would not be presenting a paper that
revealed how he and his colleagues cracked SDMI -- the recording
industry's chosen method of cryptographically protecting digital
music. Edward Felten, who was scheduled to present his findings before
the Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop in Pennsylvania,
explained that threats of legal action by the Recording Industry
Association of America had persuaded him to stay silent.

Free-speech advocates should be cheering his decision.

First, some background to the story: Last fall, the Secure Digital
Music Initiative held a "Hack SDMI" contest, asking hackers to try to
break their proposed watermarking schemes for digital music. Felten, a
cryptography expert from Princeton University, and several of his
students took SDMI up on the offer, and soon announced that they had
indeed cracked all four watermarks. But the group withdrew its hacks
after Phase 1 of the contest. Instead of claiming the prize, Felten
announced that he would publish a paper explaining how his team broke
the watermarks for research purposes.

Six months later, Felten planned to finally reveal his research. But
in early April, the professor received a letter from Matthew
Oppenheim, senior vice president of business and legal affairs for the
RIAA, threatening him with legal action if he persisted on publishing
his paper. According to Oppenheim, Felten was violating the terms of a
click-through agreement he "signed" when he participated in Hack SDMI,
which forbade any public revelation of cracking methodologies.

More disconcertingly, Oppenheim also invoked the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act. An excerpt from his widely circulated letter reads:
"Because public disclosure of your research would be outside the
limited authorization of the Agreement, you could be subject to
enforcement actions under federal law, including the DMCA."

In other words, SDMI and the RIAA were hoping to prevent the professor
from publishing legitimate research by invoking the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act. At first glance, they succeeded. Felten withdrew his
paper from the conference, saying that "litigation is costly,
time-consuming, and uncertain, regardless of the merits of the other
side's case. Ultimately we, the authors, reached a collective decision
not to expose ourselves, our employers, and the conference organizers
to litigation at this time."

Felten's decision can be seen as eminently savvy -- and not because he
chose to avoid litigation. His actions, along with the shortsighted
bullying tactics of the RIAA, set a precedent that could potentially
undermine the widely disparaged DMCA.

On May 1, 2600 Magazine is heading to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals to battle the legitimacy of the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act, which was invoked to prevent the 2600 Web site from distributing
the DeCSS DVD decryption code. The Electronic Frontier Foundation,
which has argued that the DMCA is too onerous and is being used by big
corporations to quash free speech online, is calling the 2600 legal
battle "a landmark case about free speech and copyright on the
Internet."

Thanks to the Felten fiasco, the EFF and 2600 Magazine have a new
weapon in their legal arguments against the loathed copyright law: The
RIAA has now, in effect, used the DMCA to stifle academic research. As
Roger Parloff and Charles Mann pointed out in Inside.com, even the
authors of the DMCA didn't intend for this to happen.

The upshot? The DMCA is being constitutionally undermined by the
RIAA's own decision to try to gag a high-profile professor. Felten
surely recognized this when he decided to be "intimidated" into
pulling his paper (realizing, of course, that it was already being
widely distributed on the Internet anyway).

Of course, the DMCA is the recording industry's favorite weapon, and
has been the basis of most of its copyright battles against Napster
and a host of other music sites. The last thing the recording industry
wants is to lose this useful legal tool, and in the wake of Felten's
announcement, the RIAA seems to have also realized its tactical
mistake. On Thursday, Oppenheim released a backpedaling statement:
"The Secure Digital Music Initiative Foundation (SDMI) does not -- nor
did it ever -- intend to bring any legal action against Professor
Felten or his co-authors. We sent the letter because we felt an
obligation to the watermark licensees who had voluntarily submitted
their valuable inventions to SDMI for testing ... The Recording
Industry Association of America, one of the founding members of SDMI,
strongly believes in academic freedom and freedom of speech."

Alas, for the RIAA, it may be too little, too late. The question now
is whether the EFF's lawyers will be wise enough to bring this up in
their legal arguments next week -- and whether the judge in the 2nd
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will see through the RIAA's charade.

- - - - - - - - - - - -


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