WASHINGTON -- Ed Felten is one determined computer scientist.
After the recording industry warned the Princeton University researcher not to speak at a conference in April about how he and colleagues cracked anti-copying technology, Felten didn't give up.
In June, Felten and seven other researchers sued the Recording Industry Association of America in federal court, asking that they be permitted to disclose their work at the Usenix security conference this week.
On Wednesday evening, Felten took the stage in front of a crowded auditorium in the lower level of the J.W. Marriott hotel, took a deep breath, and launched into a discussion of his co-authored paper, "Reading Between the Lines: Lessons from the SDMI Challenge."
It was a public celebration of an academic's personal fight against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act -- the 1998 law that copyright holders are using as a legal bludgeon against security researchers.
It was also entirely anticlimactic.
No armed FBI agents appeared to drag Felten off in handcuffs, which is what happened to accused DMCA violator Dmitry Sklyarov after he visited Las Vegas, Nevada, for the Defcon hacker gathering.
No last-minute court wrangling took place over the content of the paper, which described flaws in the digital watermarks owned by the Secure Digital Music Initiative Foundation. In fact, a nearly identical draft of the paper has been circulating on the Internet since April.
Felten's lawsuit, organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, pits academics and civil libertarians against the recording industry, which believes that without the DMCA, piracy will thrive online, recording artists will no longer be compensated for their work and America's economy will eventually suffer. EFF is fighting eight movie studios in another suit challenging the DMCA that is currently before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
For its part, the recording industry now insists that the legal spat this spring was entirely a miscommunication, even a misunderstanding.
"As we have stated publicly many times over, we have no objections whatsoever to Professor Felten presenting his paper," Jano Cabrera, RIAA communications director, said on Wednesday. "In fact, we have publicly urged him to do so in the past. We do not plan, nor did we ever plan to file action against Professor Felten in this matter."
But it was the SDMI Foundation that was always Felten's most strident adversary. It wrote a letter to him in April warning him that publishing details at the Information Hiding Workshop "could subject you and your research team to actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."
After the conference was over, however, SDMI said it "does not -- nor did it ever -- intend to bring any legal action" against Felten. RIAA stressed at the time that its member companies are strong believers in free speech.
Cindy Cohn, an attorney for EFF, disputed such a characterization and pointed to a legal declaration by Felten sent to the RIAA on Monday. It outlines repeated conversations with RIAA and SDMI representatives and describes what Felten calls repeated legal threats.
"I don't think you can credibly say" that there was no threat, Cohn said.
For his part, the RIAA's Cabrera concedes that "the letter was too strongly worded." Cabrera said that they never would have sued Felten, and "his claims to the contrary are motivated more out of a desire for publicity than fact."
Last year, SDMI organized a challenge to the cryptologic community offering a prize of up to $10,000 to anyone who could "remove the watermark or defeat the other technology on our proposed copyright protection system."
Felten and his colleagues, including Bede Liu, Scott Craver and Dan Wallach, wrote a paper describing their attack on the watermarks. Craver, a graduate student, is listed first on the paper and presented it to Usenix on Wednesday.
They're asking for a declaratory judgment, which allows a court to weigh in on concrete disputes where constitutional rights are at stake that have not yet led to a lawsuit.
One plaintiff, Min Wu, is asking for a declaratory judgment that would allow her to publish her complete thesis, titled "Multimedia Data Hiding." Currently her thesis is online, but it's missing Chapter 10, which describes her work on the SDMI contest.
The DMCA makes it illegal to distribute any technology that "is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure" and also prohibits "the intentional removal or alteration of copyright management information" such as watermarks.
Usenix asked the court to block the Justice Department from prosecuting the conference organizers for allowing the paper to be presented. For certain "commercial" activities, the law promises fines of up to $500,000 and a prison term of five years.
No rulings have yet taken place in the lawsuit. The recording industry's response is due next month.
