RIAA threatens watermarking researcher with legal action to prevent conference presentation.
April 24, 2001 9:21 AM   Subscribe

RIAA threatens watermarking researcher with legal action to prevent conference presentation. Nice, now we can't even do research on it. Apoligies for the must-register link.
posted by DiplomaticImmunity (11 comments total)
 
apologies too :)
posted by DiplomaticImmunity at 9:24 AM on April 24, 2001


Here's an (admittedly imperfect) analogy. Suppose I'm a cancer specialist, helping patients with the disease get healthy. Can I sue the researchers on the Human Genome Project, whose work may results in fewer cancer patients, and therefore may be impacting the future of my practice?
posted by jpoulos at 10:22 AM on April 24, 2001


But on Friday an early version of the paper and a copy of the letter from the S.D.M.I. group were posted on a civil-liberties-oriented Web site, (www.cryptome.org).

And you can have your own mirror as well!!
posted by fooljay at 10:23 AM on April 24, 2001


I see that they were using the 10 - 25 hz range for some of their encryptions. Hasn't that frequency range been shown to cause discomfort in people at high volumes? I remember the gov't had developed some crowd control technology that made people feel faint, evacuate their bowels... I wonder if it is a concern that encrypting the music in that way might subtly turn people off of those files by physiology.

"Man, there's music that you can't hear on those cd's. It sings: 'We are the borg, it is useless to resist us.'"

More probably people would listen to it for kicks. "And then I started feeling all tingly inside..."


Anyway, that's neat. I didn't know this was how they were doing their watermarking. I thought it was some super elusive 1337 stuff. Pretty soon they'll try to ban programs that allow analysis of frequency spectra.
posted by mblandi at 10:57 AM on April 24, 2001


sorry encrypting, I meant watermarking
posted by mblandi at 10:58 AM on April 24, 2001


Here's the usual NY Times no-registration backdoor link to that article. (Just replace "www" with "channel".)
posted by nicwolff at 11:10 AM on April 24, 2001


Ahem.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 12:05 PM on April 24, 2001


Ahem - the point of this is the guy getting sued though, not that the challenge existed. Not a repost.
posted by DiplomaticImmunity at 12:40 PM on April 24, 2001


The article linked to here starts with a transcript of the letter sent by Matthew J. Oppenheim of SDMI to Professor Felton, threatening him with prosecution under DMCA if he published his paper. This is the letter which is discussed, but not quoted, by the NYTimes. Go follow the link and read it.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 12:49 PM on April 24, 2001


Yes, and the article linked to here is the news story out today by the New York Times. :-)

Still, this is probably better as a followup to the previous post...
posted by fooljay at 1:14 PM on April 24, 2001


I actually encourage the mirroring of this information, however I've got a real problem with John Markoff. Go hit Kevin Mitnick's site and do a search for "Markoff". John practically criminalized Kevin in the media and made Tsutomu Shimomura a darling of the media...
posted by dincognito at 4:29 PM on April 24, 2001


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