Princeton University computer scientist Edward Felten has a knack for poking holes in technologies and, in doing so, giving industry heavyweights a black eye.
Felten, 38, became the poster child for academic freedom Thursday when he and seven co-authors announced at an academic conference that they will bow to legal threats from the recording industry. They have decided to pull an academic paper detailing how they broke watermarking security on digital music.
"We chose not to fight the battle at this time and place, but we are determined to find a way to continue fighting and eventually publish our paper," Felten said.
Many academics hope Felten and his colleagues would keep fighting so that the ability to publish code-cracking research doesn't wither under a new body of laws that make it illegal to circumvent copyright-protection technologies.
"Central casting could not have sent a better defendant," said Jonathan Zittrain, of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, who hopes the courts eventually would strike down the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.
This is not the first time Felten and his students have taken on powerful adversaries. In 1996, they found security flaws in the Java programming language. In 1999, working for the U.S. Department of Justice, Felten developed a prototype software program to remove Microsoft's browser from Windows 98, after the company said the browser was an integral part of the operating system.
Later, Felten and former students Christian Hicks and Peter Creath embarrassed the Redmond giant again. During the antitrust trial, the three men showed that a videotaped demonstration of flaws in Felten's program, which Microsoft had entered into evidence, did not document one continuous product demonstration, as the company had said. Instead, the program had been doctored.
"All of us jumped up at the same time, pointing and saying, 'That's not right. How dare they?' " recalled Hicks, now a consultant at Elysium Digital.
Felten said in an interview that he wouldn't take on a challenge unless he believed it to be a just cause. The latest tangle came about from his interest in the question of whether watermarking technologies – the supposedly inaudible additions to digital recordings – provide a viable method of protecting music copyrights in the digital age.
"He's driven by an intense curiosity and desire to have technology meet the needs of users and the public," said Steve Holtzman, a former Justice Department lawyer who is now with Boies, Schiller & Flexner, which represents Napster.
In September, the Secure Digital Music Initiative, an industry group that's pushing standards for digital-music copyright protection, challenged the code-cracking community to break its watermarking technologies. Felten's team – made up of researchers from Princeton and Rice universities, and an employee of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center – claimed success. SDMI argued that the team's techniques resulted in poor sound quality; later it rewarded two other attacks instead.
Felten and his co-authors were set to deliver a paper on how they cracked the technology at last week's Information Hiding Workshop conference in Pittsburgh. After receiving a letter threatening legal action from Matthew Oppenheim, a senior lawyer for the Recording Industry Association of American and official of the SDMI Foundation, they withdrew the paper.
In a statement Thursday, Oppenheim denied that the SDMI Foundation or the RIAA had ever intended to sue Felten. He said he sent the letter because "we felt an obligation to the watermark licensees who had voluntarily submitted their valuable inventions to SDMI for testing."
The maker of the watermarking product in question, Verance, issued a statement saying it supports academic freedom but that researchers "bear a responsibility to conduct their research and publish its results in an ethical
