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[FYI] Nachspiel des SDMI-Hack-Contest: DCMA und die Unterrichtung der Oeffentlichkeit



http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/15/technology/15TUNE.html?printpage=yes

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January 15, 2001 

Group Says It Beat Music Security but Can't Reveal How

By AMY HARMON

Edward W. Felten, an associate professor of computer science at 
Princeton , is perhaps best known for his role in the Microsoft 
antitrust trial. During the trial, where he demonstrated a program 
that he said stripped the Internet Explorer browser from the Windows 
operating system, he spent hours explaining what he had done and how 
he had done it.  

But the professor has been far less forthcoming about a more recent 
hack, and at a conference last week he explained why: Lawyers have 
advised him that publicizing the details of his tinkering could 
violate a 1998 federal law called the Digital Millennium Copyright 
Act.  

As part of an industry competition to test the security of a digital 
music copyright protection system developed by a group of 
entertainment and technology companies, Professor Felten was part of 
a group that says it successfully disabled the system. But he said he 
was reluctant to make public the details of how it was done because 
the 1998 law made it a crime to manufacture or "offer to the public" 
a way to gain unauthorized access to any copyright-protected work 
that has been secured by a technology like encryption.  

"It is not clear the extent to which we're allowed to publish our 
results or discuss them in public," Dr. Felten told about 400 people 
at Georgetown University last week at a two- day conference sponsored 
by the Coalition for the Future of Music.  

[...]

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