AfterDawn: News

Princeton University computer science professor Edward Felten, who has claimed that his team has successfully cracked the SDMI scheme - a music copyright protection method developed by the RIAA, Recording Industry Association of America. They claim that they cracked the SDMI protections when SDMI consortium challenged hackers all over the world to freely crack the protection scheme and to take part of their cracking competition.

Anyway, Princeton team didn't take part of the competition, because under the terms of the competition, the group wasn't allowed to publish their results.



Now, team's legal advisors say that they shouldn't publish these results in any case, because if they do publish the results and technical information about the SDMI and how to crack it, they could be sued by the SDMI claiming that they've violated DMCA laws (=Digital Millennium Copyright Act) which makes it illegal to spread (in U.S.) anything that can be used to violate copyrights. The same set of laws is also used against the sites that have spread the DeCSS, notorious program that allows users to by-pass the DVD copy-protections.

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 17 Jan 2001 1:25