Music industry asks hackers' help

The Secure Digital Music Initiative, the consortium set up largely by people who oppose Napster and other file-sharing systems, is sponsoring a contest for hackers that would test their product for defects. According to Leonardo Chiariglione, the chief of SDMI and the creator of the MP3 format, anyone who breaks the group's copyright protection currently in development, deleting a watermark from a marked file, will win $10,000 and help the music industry prevent unauthorized copying. Thus far, at least one open-source group, the Linux Journal, is urging programmers to boycott the contest.

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