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From newscientist.com
Censored music protection research revealed
19:02 14 August 01
Will Knight
A US computer scientist will this week present research revealing key weaknesses in technology developed to stop people illegally copying music.
In April, a lawyer representing the Recording Industry Association of America, which created the watermarking technology, threatened Edward Felton of Princeton University with legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) if he made his research public. The RIAA has since said that it never intended to sue.
The DMCA prohibits trafficking or promoting "any technology, product, service, device, component or part" that circumvents copy protection systems. The RIAA has now backed down following a counter lawsuit brought by Felton and his colleagues, alleging that the DMCA was used to restrict their first amendment right to free speech.
Computer scientists are still up in arms about the DMCA. They claim that the Act is being used to control academic free speech.
"Not only in computer science, but also across all scientific fields, sceptical analysis of technical claims made by others, and the presentation of detailed evidence to support such analysis, is the heart of the scientific method," says Felten. "To outlaw such analysis is to outlaw the scientific method itself."
Similar fate
Other computer experts researching copy protection systems say they fear the same fate if they present their work at a US conference. Niels Ferguson, a Dutch computer scientist who discovered a flaw in a digital video system told New Scientist: "The DMCA is a great restriction to my freedom of speech. I could face arrest if I visit the US after my research had found its way into the jurisdiction."
Felton will now present his work at the USENIX security conference in Washington on Wednesday. He plans to broadcast the presentation on the internet to draw maximum attention to the fact that he was forced to keep the work secret earlier in the year.
In late 2000, the RIAA created four different methods of inserting a digital watermark into a piece of music, as part of its Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI). This technology is not in use, but the RIAA had planned to use it to protect digital music online.
Challenge to programmers
A digital watermark is secondary piece of data entangled with digital music and designed to ruin the original file if removed.
The RIAA created a contest, challenging programmers to remove the watermarks without impairing the quality of a digital music file.
Felton says that he discovered a way of beating all four watermarking systems and planned to present his findings at the Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop in Pennsylvania, in April 2001.
Felton and his fellow researchers are not the only ones to have fallen foul of the DMCA. Russian computer programmer Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested in July 2001 shortly after presenting work at a computer security conference in Las Vegas. Sklyarov demonstrated a technique for bypassing the copy protection system used by Adobe to stop duplication of electronic books stored in its eBook format.
Although this is legal in Russia, Sklyarov was arrested for violating the DMCA. He is the first to have been prosecuted under the act. |
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