SDMI − copyrighted music

SDMI is the secure digital music initiative. They issued a challenge last year to any comers to crack their protection. Anyone who agreed to enter the contest was bound to secrecy, though and not allowed to reveal any details of how they cracked it, if indeed they could. Once group from Princeton declined because of this proviso and cracked it anyway. Turns out they can now be prosecuted under the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) which purports to disallow reverse-engineering of software of any kind. This is a bad thing.

The Register doesn\’t seem to be afraid of similar prosecution as has already occurred in the DeCSS case as they have recounted the story in greater detail here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/8/18434.html

and actually published Princeton\’s results here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/extra/sdmi-attack.htm

Good for them.

P.S. If you are really interested in the second link and it\’s been taken down (though I\’m hoping that the long arm of U.S. law doesn\’t extend to British servers yet), I have a copy here:

http://www.earthli.com/users/marco/sdmi-attack.html