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Good thing for Alex Halderman ('03) that Ed Felten is on the faculty. The Princeton senior could use his professor's seasoned advice right about now on the perils of doing computer science research under the rule of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
On Monday, Halderman presented his junior paper, "Evaluating New Copy-Prevention Techniques for Audio CDs," at the 2002 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management -- an act that could be seen as a violation of the DMCA.
Last month, in a post to his own personal blog Freedom To Tinker (devoted to the topic of reverse-engineering rights), Professor Felten noted that "It's rare to see a workshop like this accept a single-author paper written by an undergraduate; but this paper is really good."
In 2001, Felten was forced to defend a paper he co-authored from DMCA-related threats allegedly leveled by the RIAA and SDMI. Halderman's paper, like Felten's, exposes flaws in technology being employed by the recording industry, intended to protect copyrighted material. An excerpt from Halderman's abstract reads:
"We conclude that these schemes are harmful to legitimate CD owners and will not reduce illegal copying in the long term, so the music industry should reconsider their deployment."
Yesterday's Daily Princetonian coverage of the story exposed an unfortunate detail: Haldeman's admission that he wrote a different paper, in the shadow of the DMCA, than he would have liked to have written. Specifically, he refrained from including a program as a proof of his research hypotheses (the legality of which the DMCA challenges).
This is precisely the type of self-censorship DMCA opponents abhor, particularly when it impacts the research community. To their credit, the faculty at Princeton responded to the legal intimidation against Felten and his colleagues by voting to establish a committee to address such threats to academic freedom. The Princetonian notes that "the University has provided indemnification — legal defense — for students and faculty in the past, when they were performing a certain function for the University."
As of this writing, the paper is available in PDF form.
Posted by Maggie Law at November 22, 2002 10:55 PM