last August, a research team led by Princeton professor Edward Felten presented a paper that was at the center of a debate over the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which restricts dissemination of decryption information and, according to some academics and civil libertarians, limits the freedom of scientific research. The controversy began last fall when Felten's team, which also included researchers from Rice University and a Xerox research center, broke encryption technologies created by the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a collection of 200 major record labels and hardware/software manufacturers working to protect digital audio. In a public challenge, the SDMI had been offering a dollar 10,000 prize to anyone who could remove a digital watermark from a music file in less than a month. The research team said they broke most of the encryption techniques within three weeks. "You don't have to be a world-class computer scientist to defeat these technologies by any means," Felten said. He also noted that the team turned down the prize money so they wouldn't feel restrained in publishing their findings, but when the SDMI and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) learned the researchers planned to present a paper at a conference in April, the RIAA sent a letter to Felten stating that "any disclosure of information gained from participating in the public challenge" could subject the researchers "to actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act." The team withdrew the paper from the conference and in June filed a federal lawsuit against the recording association. The suit asked for protection in publishing the team's findings and challenged sections of the Digital Millennium CopyrightAct as unconstitutional restrictions on free speech. Representatives of the RIAA said they had never threatened the researchers, and were surprised they had been sued.
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