PITTSBURGH -- A team of academics who broke a music-watermarking scheme bowed to legal threats from the entertainment industry and decided not to describe their research at a conference on Thursday.
The Recording Industry Association of America and two other groups had threatened to sue the nine researchers if they presented a paper detailing how they circumvented a system that could aid in limiting the illicit copying of audio and video files.
"We, the authors, reached a collective decision not to expose ourselves, our employers, and the conference organizers to litigation at this time," Ed Felten, a computer science professor at Princeton, told a crowd of reporters who gathered in the lobby of the Holiday Inn where the Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop was taking place.
Felten said he and his colleagues would "fight another day, in another way, for the right to publish our paper," but did not say how or when that would happen.
The RIAA, the Secure Digital Music Initiative, and Verance told the academics earlier this month that the planned publication of their work at this conference violated the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is being challenged before a New York federal appeals court.
Making the waters murkier is the fact that the academics clicked on an online agreement when participating in an SDMI contest which, if valid, would be a contract limiting their ability to publish.
A near-final draft of their paper is already widely distributed online and the industry has not brought suit. On Friday, an anonymous source leaked a copy to Cryptome.org, which published it.
Ross Anderson, who is on the conference program committee, said that "there is a question whether it will be prudent to hold certain types of security conferences in the U.S. in the future.
"We can't really tolerate a situation where anyone who breaks a system that embarrasses someone gets served with a writ," said Anderson, who is a reader in security engineering at Cambridge University.
Anderson said that the program chair, Ira Moskowitz, was forced by his employer last week to ban the researchers from presenting the paper. Moskowitz works for the Naval Research Laboratory, a co-sponsor of the conference.
But the program committee overruled him, citing principles of academic freedom, and decided that the work could be presented because it was accepted on the strength of its technical content.
Like most prestigious universities, Princeton has a strong policy of academic freedom, and it might be seen as surprising that Princeton refused to provide a legal defense for Felten.
After all, when the National Security Agency threatened MIT in 1977 regarding the distribution of encryption literature, MIT refused the NSA's request.
But in this case, not all the researchers are at Princeton, and some of the other institutions reportedly did not want a legal battle.
"There are a lot of names involved, and not everyone has the luxury of an employer that will support them," said Peter Wayner, author of the book Disappearing Cryptography.
