Felix Stalder on Sun, 29 Apr 2001 20:30:14 +0200 (CEST)


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<nettime> More on SDMI Challenge




Watermark Holes? C'est La Vie 
By Declan McCullagh 
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,43390,00.html

2:00 a.m. April 28, 2001 PDT 

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania -- It's a bit of a mystery: First, the recording 
industry successfully intimidated a team of academics led by a Princeton 
University professor
into not revealing the vulnerabilities of a music watermarking scheme. 

But a French researcher presented similar work at a conference here on Friday, 
a day after Princeton's Ed Felten backed down, and encountered nary a lawsuit. 

Julien Stern, the co-author of the analysis, reports he never even received a 
lawyer nastygram. "They never contacted me," he said. 

The paper he wrote with another graduate student, Julien Boeuf, is called "An 
analysis of one of the SDMI candidates," and it was available on their website 
long
before lawyers from the Secure Digital Music Initiative contacted Felten. 

So why didn't SDMI ask him to delete it? 

First, the French grad students published their paper immediately, instead of 
waiting to unveil it at the Information Hiding Workshop this week. 

Second, the French researchers penetrated just one of the technologies in the 
SDMI challenge -- and the Princeton team was more successful. 

Third, and perhaps most likely, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act doesn't 
exist in France and doesn't cover the activities of French citizens. The music 
industry
claimed that by presenting his paper, Felten would have violated the DMCA. 

Next year's workshop, incidentally, is scheduled to be held in Europe. 


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