Thursday, August 16, 2001
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Princeton Cryptographer's Challenge to Music Industry Draws Computer Scientists' SupportBy ANDREA L. FOSTER
Washington
Computer scientists filed legal papers this week in support of a Princeton University cryptographer and his team of scholars as they prepared to give a presentation on Wednesday describing their research on cracking a safeguard that limits access to digital music. The research team, led by Edward W. Felten, an associate professor of computer science, discussed weaknesses in the technology, which creates what is known as a digital watermark. Team members spoke at a computer-security conference in Washington sponsored by the Usenix Association. The association, a nonprofit group of computer engineers and scientists, also circulated copies of Mr. Felten's research at the conference, which began Monday and ends Friday. The Recording Industry Association of America and Verance Corporation, the company that designed the watermark that Mr. Felten broke, tried to suppress dissemination of the professor's research in April. They said that publishing the research could contribute to widespread copying of electronic music that is protected under copyright law. But after Mr. Felten sued the recording-industry group in June in a federal district court in Trenton, N.J., the group retreated and said it would not try to stop his presentation at the Usenix conference. In the lawsuit, Mr. Felten asked the court to grant the researchers immunity from prosecution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The anti-circumvention provision of the 1998 law makes it a crime for someone to distribute decryption technology that can circumvent access controls on copyrighted works. The recording industry has used the digital copyright law to threaten hackers and researchers who publicly reveal weaknesses in safeguards designed to protect digital music. But their representatives have repeatedly said they never intended to sue Mr. Felten and his research team if they presented their watermark research. In declarations submitted to the court this week, professors from Princeton, the University of Maryland, and the University of Pennsylvania said that the recording industry's April chastisement of Mr. Felten was chilling their research. A Princeton graduate student submitted a similar statement. The student, Scott Craver, is a doctoral candidate in the electrical-engineering department who helped Mr. Felten analyze the Verance watermark. Mr. Craver said his research on the "forensic analysis" of digital music was being stymied. He said that he feared being sued by Verance and the recording-industry group, and that he had been reluctant to invite other researchers to collaborate with him out of concern that they, too, might be sued. "My research project will take more time to complete, and will not benefit from the contributions of others," Mr. Craver wrote in his statement. Min Wu, a computer-science faculty member at the University of Maryland, was also part of Mr. Felten's research team. She said she was holding off on an invitation from Kluwer Academic Publishers to publish her dissertation on breaking digital watermarks because she was concerned about being sued. And Matthew Blaze, a cryptographer at AT&T Laboratories who is an adjunct computer-science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that he was "reluctant to continue engaging in the study of vulnerabilities in existing and proposed security systems." Mr. Felten, in a separate declaration filed with the court, said his experience with the recording industry had influenced the advice he gives to graduate students on what research topics they should explore. "A student can ill afford to devote time to a project that may prove unpublishable due to the [digital-copyright law], and I cannot in good conscience advise him to do so," the professor said. His declaration, and others, are available online on the Web site of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing Mr. Felten and his research team. At a news conference Wednesday morning, Mr. Felten said that while he and other researchers were pleased to be able at last to discuss the watermark's weaknesses, nonetheless "there's a big cloud that hangs over research into existing technologies." In addition to the scholars, several industry cryptologists filed declarations in support of Mr. Felten, including one from Britain and another from the Netherlands. Declarations were also filed by the Association for Computing Machinery and by Edward Lazowska, a member of the board of the Computing Research Association who is chairman of the computer-science department at the University of Washington. The computing-machinery group, a professional group of computer scientists, said the digital copyright law could limit the success of a computer-security conference that the group has planned for November. Mr. Lazowska said the Computing Research Association, which is made up of computer scientists in academe, industry, and government, was "vitally concerned that the pall cast by the [digital copyright law] ... will stifle its members' research efforts and weaken academic computing research programs."
Background articles from The Chronicle:
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 Former fund raiser for Humboldt State accused of recording $15-million in bogus gifts Law school dean faces a second accusation of plagiarism Mount Holyoke College and alumnae association resolve dispute over contributions 2 American students are arrested at demonstration in Jerusalem Increases in tuition and aid are proposed in Trinidad and Tobago U.S. Dept. of Education awards $27.2 million to disadvantaged and minority institutions Continuing problems with online-application system worry medical schools Princeton cryptographer's challenge to music industry draws computer scientists' support High-speed networks let a music professor in New York teach a student in Oklahoma |
Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education