News

Back in September, the Secure">http://www.sdmi.org">Secure Digital Music Initiative issued a public challenge that offered cash rewards for successfully uncovering and removing watermarks from recorded music. The challenge">http://www.stereophile.com/news/10878/">challenge was met by a number of hackers, most notable among them Professor Edward Felten of Princeton University's Computer Science Department.

After months of wrangling, the Secure">http://www.sdmi.org/">Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) has selected Aris">http://www.musicode.com/">Aris Technologies' MusiCode as its recommended form of digital audio copy protection, according to an inside source at SDMI. The decision came at the end of weeks of testinghttp://www.stereophile.com/news/10511/">testing; various watermarking techniques on the music industry's "golden ears"—recording and mastering engineers, music producers, and professional audiophiles. The official announcement is expected later this week.

Folk wisdom has it that it's wiser not to lock the gate after the horses have escaped. The Secure">http://www.sdmi.org/">Secure Digital Music Initiative, a consortium of 140 music, software, and hardware companies, has taken that adage to heart. In a significant departure from its original intent to block the distribution of free music on the Internet, the Secure Digital Music Initiative announced in the last week of June that its forthcoming specification for music software and hardware will accommodate the "legacy content" already in existence. There are reportedly as many as 500,000 songs available in the MP3 format, and they will continue to be available even as new, robustly encrypted music comes onto the market.

In a move that some cynics are calling "the beginning of the end" for the Secure">http://www.sdmi.org/">Secure Digital Music Initiative, the group's director has abruptly resigned. Leonard Chiariglione, who has headed the cross-industry anti-piracy organization since its inception more than two years ago, made the announcement Wednesday, January 24 at the first SDMI meeting of 2001.

Sudden awareness of free digital downloadable music on the Internet sent the music industry into a panic last year. The Secure">http://www.sdmi.org/">Secure Digital Music Initiative, a coalition of record labels, software companies, and electronics manufacturers, worked overtime developing standards for encrypting music in an attempt to thwart piracy. Preliminary guidelines for copyright protection were issued in June. Most recently, the SDMI completed a series of listening tests intended to find the least intrusive form of encryption. The organization seemed to present a united front in the anti-piracy war.

Which has more value in the 21st century: the constitutionally-guaranteed right to free speech or the music industry's right to protect its encryption technology? Princeton University professor Edward W. Felten intends to find out.

Phase One of the Secure">http://sdmi.org/">Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) will incorporate watermarking technology for DVD-Audio from Verance">http://www.verance.com/">Verance Corporation. The agreement was announced at a meeting of the SDMI in Hawaii early in December. Verance Corp. was formed recently by the merger of ARIS Technologies Corporation and Solana Technology Development Corp. ARIS's technology was announced a few months ago as the SDMI's choice for watermarking.