Petteri Pyyny
6 Jun 2001 14:22
Princeton University researcher Edward Felten and the organizers of USENIX security conference have sued RIAA, SDMI and Verance over the rights to publish Felten's findings how to crack the SDMI music copyright protection schema.
Backed by EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation, same instance that backs also website 2600 in its case with MPAA) Felten and USENIX have sued these parties and U.S. Department of Justice. RIAA and SDMI threatened to sue Felten if he would publish his findings on SDMI copyright protection which includes one watermarking technology developed by Verance.
Felten and his research team were forced to pull their presentation from USENIX conference and now he seeks a decision from court how DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) limits, if it limits, researchers to publish their work. This same issue might apply to other similiar cases, let's say researchers publishing their instructions how to break the CSS (copy protection used in DVD movies) -- it depends totally on court, do they want to rule their decision to specifically to SDMI case or do they want to take a broad view on issue.