Draconian DCMA Attacks Academic Freedom

Draconian DCMA Attacks Academic Freedom
"Code-Breakers Go to Court"

-By Declan McCullagh, Reported in Wired Magazine: June 6, 2001

WASHINGTON -- After a team of academics who broke a music-watermarking scheme bowed to legal threats from the recording industry and chose not to publish their research in April, they vowed to "fight another day, in another way."

On Wednesday, Ed Felten of Princeton University and seven other researchers took their fight to a New Jersey federal court in a lawsuit asking that they be permitted to disclose their work at a security conference this summer.

Joining them is the Usenix Association, a 26-year-old professional organization that has accepted Felten's paper for its 10th security symposium in Washington during the week of Aug. 13. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is representing the researchers and Usenix.

In what appears to be the first legal challenge to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's criminal sections, Usenix is asking the court to block the Justice Department from prosecuting the conference organizers for allowing the paper to be presented. For "commercial" activities, the law promises fines of up to $500,000 and a prison term of five years.

"Studying digital access technologies and publishing the research for our colleagues are both fundamental to the progress of science and academic freedom," said Felten, an associate professor of computer science. "The recording industry's interpretation of the DMCA would make scientific progress on this important topic illegal."

This case pits academics and civil libertarians against the recording industry, which believes that without the DMCA, piracy will thrive online, recording artists will not be compensated for their work and America's economy will eventually suffer. EFF currently is fighting eight movie studios in another suit challenging the DMCA that is currently before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

"When scientists are intimidated from publishing their work, there is a clear First Amendment problem," EFF legal director Cindy Cohn said in a statement. "We have long argued that unless properly limited, the anti-distribution provisions of the DMCA would interfere with science. Now they plainly have."

The lawsuit, to be filed Wednesday, names the Recording Industry Association of America, the Secure Digital Music Initiative, Attorney General John Ashcroft and watermarking company Verance as defendants.

In April, the industry groups told Felten and his co-authors that the planned publication of their work at the Information Hiding Workshop violated the DMCA, and after a remarkable amount of confusion, the researchers abandoned their plans to discuss their successful attempts to remove Verance's watermark from a digital music file.

Last year, SDMI organized a challenge to the cryptologic community offering a prize up to $10,000 to anyone who "can remove the watermark or defeat the other technology on our proposed copyright protection system." Felten and his colleagues, including Bede Liu, Scott Craver and Dan Wallach, wrote a paper describing their attack on the watermarks.

They're asking for declaratory judgment, which allows a court to weigh in on concrete disputes where constitutional rights are at stake that have not yet led to a lawsuit.

One plaintiff, Min Wu, is asking for a declaratory judgment that would allow her to publish her complete thesis, titled "Multimedia Data Hiding." Currently her thesis is online, but it's missing Chapter 10, which describes her work on the SDMI contest.

The DMCA makes it illegal to distribute any technology that "is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure" and also prohibits the "the intentional removal or alteration of copyright management information" such as watermarks.