Dr. Dobb's Journal July 2001
Integrity took a holiday recently. More precisely, it took a back-alley butt-kicking. To see how, take a gander at the letter Matthew Oppenheim, a lawyer for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and secretary of the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) Foundation, sent to Princeton University professor Edward Felton. In his letter (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/riaaletter.html), Oppenheim threatened legal action against Felton, his researchers, and presumably any of his unborn children, if Felton and his team of researchers presented a paper entitled "Reading Between The Lines: Lessons From The SDMI Challenge," at the 4th International Information Hiding Workshop (http://www.cert.org/IHW2001/).
What precipitated Oppenheim's letter was a challenge the SDMI Foundation made last year regarding the strength of its proposed security schemes for the digital distribution of music (http://www.sdmi.org/pr/OL_Sept_6_2000.htm). Essentially, the SDMI was backing a digital watermark system in which inaudible copyright information was to be hidden in music. Devices such as MP3 players/recorders could then be prevented from copying, sharing, or using digital music, depending on the watermark. All in all, the SDMI was evaluating four proposed technologies, and to sweeten the pot, the SDMI offered $10,000 to anyone who could remove the SDMI watermarks.
Felton's team, which included researchers from Princeton and Rice Universities, picked up the gauntlet — well, sort of. Central to the point Oppenheim tries to make in his letter is that public disclosure of information derived from the challenge would be in violation of the terms of the contest, which participants agreed to via the SDMI's click-through agreement (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/clickthru.pdf). But then, according to Felton, his team didn't officially enter the challenge by agreeing to the click-through, foregoing the chance of winning prize money. Instead, Team Felton simply read the available information, went ahead with their research, and proceeded to defeat all four technologies "by rendering the watermarks undetectable without significantly degrading the audio quality." And therein was the topic of their research paper.
Since it is hard to be in violation of an agreement you didn't agree to in the first place, it would seem that 95 percent of Oppenheim's letter is irrelevant. Perhaps realizing this, Oppenheim also drug out the threat of federal prosecution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that smelly piece of legislation the entertainment industry paid off Congress to enact into law.
Apparently, the RIAA and SDMI have a problem with concepts such as freedom of speech and academic debate. They forget that presenting technical papers at scientific conferences is a long-standing academic tradition that even totalitarian governments (like the former USSR) have honored. On the other hand, what they apparently don't have a problem with are concepts such as prior restraint, censorship, and abusing the legal system as a means of coercion.
Ultimately, Felton and his team opted not to present the paper because of the threat of legal action. As Felton rightly said, "Litigation is costly, time consuming, and uncertain, regardless of the merits of the other side's case." Shame on the RIAA and SDMI for standing in the way of free speech and stifling scientific debate. That Felton's research wasn't presented doesn't change the simple fact that someone else will likely break one or more of the weak watermarking schemes in the future. Instead of investing in more lawyers, what the organizations involved ought to be doing is investing in more researchers. No surprise, SDMI did try to weasel out of the bad publicity it created by offering up that it "does not — -nor did it ever — intend to bring legal action against professor Felton or his co-authors." Instead, being the compassionate stand-up guys they are, the SDMI sent the letter "because we felt an obligation to the watermark licensees who had voluntarily submitted their valuable inventions to SDMI for testing." Right. As it turns out, DVD audio products based on the now-defeated watermark technology are already commercially available.
And speaking of integrity and stand-up guys, what's up with this Microsoft fixation on open source? Previously, you recall, it was Microsoft vice president Jim Allchin who was called upon to fall on his sword by calling open source "unAmerican." More recently, it is Craig Mundie, yet another Microsoft VP, who muddled through a confused bashing of open source (wrongly equating it with GPL) before launching into a justification of the company's "shared source" model. In truth, "shared source" is nothing more than PR gibberish for commercially licensed source code. Now there's nothing wrong with this, Mundie's rhetorical contortions aside. But in intentionally obfuscating the facts, Mundie's self-serving remarks once again do Microsoft more harm than good.
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief
jerickson@ddj.com