SDMI crackers crumble

The Recording Industry Association of America, among others, has succeeded in convincing the members of the Princeton-led team who were invited to crack the Secure Digital Music Initiative's watermark copy-protection schemes not to publish the results of their work. Professor Edward Felten bowed to the threat of a lawsuit by SDMI, the RIAA and Verance, the company behind one of encryption technologies the team reportedly broke. The paper would have been presented to the Information Hiding Workshop, April 25 to 27, in Pittsburgh. An early version of the paper, however, has been distributed on the Internet.

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