Secure Digital Music Initiative
The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI; German initiative for secure digital music) is the Recording Industry Association of America originated in December 1998 from a merger with her Japanese counterpart Recording Industry Association of Japan and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. The industry association now includes computer, hi-fi, as well as hardware and software manufacturers, the copyright industry and Internet service providers. The aim of the SDMI is to develop systems for digital rights management and comprehensively enforce, inter alia, by influencing hardware and software manufacturers, legislators and the public. Today take about 200 companies participated in the industrial consortium.
While the SDMI has one hand with the development of technical protection systems for MP3 and other audio formats - the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits plays a leading role - she runs the other hand, an unprecedented campaign to condemn MP3 lump sum, as it others for nothing as the " robbery " am good of protected music. All the musicians who give away their own songs in MP3 format, for example, to promote a new album, or because they see it as an opportunity to bypass the gatekeeper function of the music industry will be studiously ignored.
The SDMI Competition
2000 invited the SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative ) as part of a contest, a researcher, to it to try to break the imaginary of their method for digital watermarking. One by one the participants were submitted to various audio excerpts in individual competitions that were provided with different labeling methods. Those participants who succeeded in a version of the cut with no watermark returned to you ( and to keep the size of signal loss as low as possible, although this requirement was not explicitly mentioned by the SDMI) would emerge as winners from the respective competition.
Edward W. Felten was involved from the start in this competition. He had decided not to sign the confidentiality agreement that would have allowed his team to receive cash prices. Although the participants, except for the cut itself, only a few were given to no information about the watermarking technology and the period for the competition was also measured quite short with three weeks - Critics speak of difficult conditions - succeeded Felten and his group, the to change files so that the evaluation program of the SDMI noted the absence of the watermark.
The SDMI then explained Felten have the watermark is not removed so as the rules prescribed it because it is a condition that the files should not lose quality. She claimed that the result of their test program was invalid, because you could also remove the watermark by the complete removal of the file contents, but this would not be permitted by the condition of quality.
Accusation by SDMI
Felten's team then created a scientific treatise, in which the methods have been described that he and his team had used to remove the watermark of the SDMI. It was planned to present this paper at the International Information Hiding Workshop, 2001 in Pittsburgh. For this reason, Felten was from the SDMI, the Recording Industry Association of America, and threatened the Verance Corporation with legal action. This allegation is based on the conditions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and thus argued that the procedures that had cracked his team would use at this time already on the market. Felten withdrew his presentation of the event and leaving instead a brief opinion on those threats. The SDMI and other copyright holders to have denied Felton ever threatened with a lawsuit. It seems, however, that at least the SDMI did indeed announced legal action, as is apparent from a letter of the speaker Matthew Oppenheim to Felten: " Any disclosure, the information obtained during the public competition, could for them and their team due have consequences of the DMCA. "
Felten sued this group (supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation) and requested a declaratory judgment that would confirm the legality of the publication of her memoir. The case was rejected because of a lack of standings, with the judge noting that: ". The irony is that the accused said that they would not sue people and the defendants these actions triggered by only that they themselves submitting action "
Felten presented his paper at the 2001 USENIX Security Conference. The U.S. Justice Department has assured Felten and other researchers that the DMCA would not affect their work, and noted that the threat of legal action had been unlawful.