January 23, 2001

11:47 AM

A while back, you'll remember, a professor from Princeton cracked the SDMI watermark, but couldn't publish [MeFi search], and weren't awarded the prize because they wouldn't NDA. Well, a French team has also cracked it, and not being bound by the US DMCA, they've published. Good thing? Or bad?
posted by baylink (3 comments total)

Neither good nor bad. And certainly not surprising. Whoever has been holding the music industry up for cash is only one upped by the crew that sold pets.com a $50M sock puppet. Watermarking *clearly* won't work, for all the reasons outlined in this article. At best the RIAA and friends are just stalling for time now (watch that insider stock!). And frankly, I don't think there's a way out of their bind.

posted by muppetboy at 1:08 PM on January 23, 2001

It's good that it got published. It's bad that the US team wasn't permitted to; it's probably unconstitutional. The EFF is suing to get the DMCA overturned, by the way, so that state of affairs might get remedied soon.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 2:51 PM on January 23, 2001

Very interesting stuff, although the reference to "burning LPs" kept throwing me off. "LP" to me implies a Long Playing (vinyl) record.
posted by milnak at 5:53 PM on January 23, 2001