FITUG e.V.

Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft

Statement Regarding the SDMI Challenge

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/announcement.html

The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) is developing a comprehensive system to prevent music piracy. Central to this system is watermarking, in which an inaudible message is hidden in music to provide copyright information to devices like MP3 players and recorders. Devices may then refuse to make copies of pieces of music, depending on the meaning of the watermark contained therein.

In September 2000, SDMI issued a public challenge to help them choose among four proposed watermarking technologies. During the three-week challenge, researchers could download samples of watermarked music, and were invited to attempt to remove the secret copyright watermarks.

During the challenge period, our team of researchers, from Princeton University, Rice University, and Xerox, successfully defeated all four of the watermarking challenges, by rendering the watermarks undetectable without significantly degrading the audio quality of the samples. Our success on these challenges was confirmed by SDMI's email server.

We are currently preparing a technical report describing our findings regarding the four watermarking challenges, and the two other miscellaneous challenges, in more detail. The technical report will be available some time in November.

This statement, a Frequently Asked Questions document, the full technical report (when it is ready), and other related information can be found on the Web at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi.

For more information, please contact Edward Felten at (609) 258-5906 or felten@cs.princeton.edu.

Scott Craver, Patrick McGregor, Min Wu, Bede Liu Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University

Adam Stubblefield, Ben Swartzlander, Dan S. Wallach Dept. of Computer Science, Rice University

Drew Dean Computer Science Laboratory, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

Edward W. Felten Dept. of Computer Science, Princeton University