Monday, January 15, 2001

Legal Concerns Delay Publication of Research on 'Digital Watermarks' By FLORENCE OLSEN Washington A Princeton University computer-science professor says the publication of his group's research on technology for protecting music files has been delayed while lawyers for the universities involved discuss whether publishing the research violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Edward W. Felten, an associate professor of computer science, says that when the lawyers complete their discussions, probably later this month, he and his colleagues will publish on their research Web site "something pretty close" to what they had originally planned to publish. But Mr. Felten said on Friday that he remains pessimistic about being able to conduct and publish such research in the future. Lawyers for the universities and institutions involved -- Princeton, Rice University, and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center -- have said that provisions in the digital-copyright act appear to prohibit research and publishing related to so-called access-control technologies. These are technologies that the recording industry and publishing companies plan to use to protect their copyrights on digital material. The digital-copyright law prohibits the distribution of devices that could be used to circumvent or break the technologies that protect copyrighted material. But Mr. Felten said there is considerable uncertainty about how broadly judges might define "a circumvention device." In a federal court case in New York last year, Mr. Felten said, a judge's opinion suggested that even text-based descriptions might be "circumvention devices," although the judge didn't rule on that question. "Given the uncertainty of the situation, we're trying to be very careful," Mr. Felten said. Mr. Felten said a recent ruling by the Librarian of Congress on the digital-copyright law's exemptions did nothing to legitimize the kind of research and publication that is of interest to him and his colleagues. (See a story from The Chronicle, November 10, 2000.) If the digital-copyright law is not changed to permit such research, it will produce the opposite of its intended effect, Mr. Felten added. "Rather than protecting access-control technology, it's guaranteeing that we will remain ignorant about how to build good access-control technology." Gregory Dobbin, a communications specialist with Educause, a consortium of colleges and companies interested in information technology, voiced similar concerns. "The unintended consequences of the act" and its level of restrictions, he said, are preventing the dissemination and even the propagation of new information and new knowledge. He added, "Everyone's so freaked out about what they can do and what they're going to get in trouble for." The research that the lawyers are now scrutinizing was conducted by Mr. Felten and colleagues in response to an offer by the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a consortium representing the recording industry and information and consumer-electronics companies. Last September, the group issued a public challenge in which it asked researchers and amateurs alike to try breaking four different watermark protections as part of a test of those technologies. To succeed, a challenger would have to remove the watermarks on a digital music recording without harming the quality of the musical recording. Mr. Felten and his colleagues claimed that they successfully hacked all four of the watermarks. But they immediately dropped out of the challenge because they were unwilling to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would have prevented them from publishing a paper on their work. The digital-copyright law offers very narrow protections for what is described in the law as "good faith encryption research," Mr. Felten said. But emerging access-control technologies such as watermarks do not use encryption-encoding techniques and, therefore, are not exempted areas of research under the current law, he said. Mr. Felten disclosed the legal reasons for the delay in publishing his group's research findings from the S.D.M.I. challenge when he spoke on Wednesday in Washington at the Future of Music Policy Summit. The summit was organized by working musicians and attended by musicians, lawyers, and law professors. Background article from The Chronicle: Scholars Decry New Copyright Rule (11/10/2000) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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