[I have been mostly offline for the last 48 hours, so I'm only now catching up. Background: http://www.politechbot.com/p-01946.html --Declan] http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,43353,00.html Watermark Crackers Back Away By Declan McCullagh (declanat_private) 8:55 a.m. April 26, 2001 PDT PITTSBURGH -- A team of academics who broke a music-watermarking scheme bowed to legal threats from the entertainment industry and decided not to describe their research at a conference on Thursday. The Recording Industry Association of America and two other groups had threatened to sue the nine researchers if they presented a paper detailing how they circumvented a system that could aid in limiting the illicit copying of audio and video files. "We, the authors, reached a collective decision not to expose ourselves, our employers, and the conference organizers to litigation at this time," Ed Felten, a computer science professor at Princeton, told a crowd of reporters who gathered in the lobby of the Holiday Inn where the Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop was taking place. Felten said he and his colleagues would "fight another day, in another way, for the right to publish our paper," but did not say how or when that would happen. The RIAA, the Secure Digital Music Initiative, and Verance told the academics earlier this month that the planned publication of their work at this conference violated the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is being challenged before a New York federal appeals court. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if it remains intact. To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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