:Roundup: Professor Felten Presents his Paper, But the DMCA's Still With Us
Roundup: Professor Felten Presents his Paper, But the DMCA's Still With Us Aug 16, 2001, 23 :54 UTC (8 Talkback[s]) (6611 reads)
It isn't, as the Industry Standard puts it, the sexiest story out
there. It's a pretty big deal, all the same, that Professor
Felten presented his paper on cracking SDMI at USENIX and
didn't end up being hauled out of the room by the FBI. On the
other hand, as this sampling of articles indicates, the Digital
Millenium Copyright Act remains, and many still consider it problematic.
"Felten said at a press conference that he was happy to finally have a chance to
present his findings, but that his legal struggles have discouraged other academic
efforts in the area.
"There is a big cloud hanging over our continued research and we don't feel safe
doing what we normally do," Felten said.
A RIAA spokesman said the trade group never intended to sue Felten, but declined
to say whether it would take action against
other academic research in the future."
"I am an independent cryptography consultant. Cryptography is the
science and art of encryption, and an essential building block
for computer security. It provides the basic functions for data
confidentiality, authentication, integrity, and non-repudiation".
"I have had to decide not to publish my HDCP paper because it
opens me up to liability under the US DMCA law, even though I
live and work in the Netherlands".
"In any case, Felten's newfound right to publish didn't cut any ice in the
case of Dmitry Sklyarov. He works for Elcomsoft, a Moscow firm that
makes software to defeat the encryption of electronic books. Elcomsoft's
product is perfectly legal in Russia, and nearly everywhere else on
earth. But when Sklyarov came to Las Vegas to talk about it in July, the
FBI slapped on the handcuffs. After two weeks in jail, a federal judge
finally let Sklyarov post bail last week, but the FBI is holding his
passport, in effect exiling Sklyarov from his homeland, his wife, and his
two young children.
It's the sort of thing to make you think twice about hacking code. It's
certainly had that effect on Niels Ferguson of Amsterdam. He thinks he's
figured out a major weakness in software created by Intel Corp. to
prevent the pirating of digital video recordings. But Ferguson has
decided to shut up about it.
Actually, Ferguson shared his discovery with fellow geeks at a Dutch
hackers' convention last weekend. And he's contacted Intel's crypto
experts, who have expressed interest in his discovery. But Ferguson
has refused to publish the details of his theory, or even to send an
e-mail to Intel headquarters, because Intel is based in the United
States."
"Someone thumbed his nose at copyright protection
Wednesday without getting arrested, indicted or
sued. Princeton professor Edward Felten and a
grad student told security experts at a conference
how to crack digital watermarks that are supposed
to prevent copying.
Not the sexiest story out there, but for Felten, boring
news is good news. After all, this is the talk Wired
News called "entirely anticlimactic" because
nobody got hauled off in handcuffs.
Felten went ahead with the presentation after the
Recording Industry Association of America
promised not to sue him over it; he'd put off revealing the details earlier this
year after he received a nastygram from the music industry and other copyright
fans. The RIAA said it never planned to sue Felten, according to the
Washington Post. The Boston Globe's Hiawatha Bray said the music industry
backed off because "Felten is a scientist, and the law makes an exception for
scholarly researchers." Anyway, News.com reported that the talk was billed as
the "presentation the RIAA does not want you to see." Not bad marketing for a
paper the Post described as "a dry,
technical analysis."
"
"It was a public celebration of an academic's personal fight against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- the 1998
law that copyright holders are using as a legal bludgeon against security researchers.
It was also entirely anticlimactic.
No armed FBI agents appeared to drag Felten off in handcuffs, which is what happened to accused DMCA
violator Dmitry Sklyarov after he visited Las Vegas,
Nevada, for the Defcon hacker gathering."
"At a Wednesday morning press conference, Felten and Cohn said
the team had the recording industry's blessing to present the
paper, but they had no assurances that the Felten team or other
scientists would be safe from other lawsuits for presenting the
same information or other work based on the Felten
research at a later date.
One college student asked the panelists whether he could be sued
under the DMCA for summarizing the evening's events to his
professor. Cohn and Peter Jaszi, an intellectual property
professor at the American University law school, said that was
unlikely, but if the student included a critique of the Felten
team's methods, the student should "theoretically" be concerned
because that might run afoul of the DMCA's prohibition on
trafficking in anti-circumvention
technologies, Jaszi said.
After the student asked if he could write software based on the
Felten team presentation, the crowd of security experts
collectively mumbled a warning. "Do you have my email?"
electronic rights defender Cohn asked the student. "Then I think
there is general consensus ... that you'd be in trouble."
Felten added: "I'd like to point out, 'Can I tell my advisor what I saw here?' doesn't have a simple answer."
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) filed a declaration in
federal court today regarding the Felten v. DMCA lawsuit challenging
the DMCA. Some sample quotes:
"Research in analysis (i.e., the evaluation of the strengths and
weaknesses of computer systems) is essential to the development of
effective security, both for works protected by copyright law and for
information in general. Such research can progress only through the
open publication and exchange of complete scientific results."
"ACM is also concerned that application of the DMCA to the
presentation and publication of scientific papers could result in the
departure from the U.S. of the information security community for
conferences and publications."
"Virtually all conferences that discuss the security of digital
information may be subject to threats under the DMCA because such
conferences consider the strengths and weaknesses of various
technological protection measures that could be applied, or are
actually being applied, to protect copyrighted works."
