As part of an industry competition to test the security of a digital music copyright protection system developed by a group of entertainment and technology companies, Professor Felten was part of a group that says it successfully disabled the system. But . . .
As part of an industry competition to test the security of a digital music copyright protection system developed by a group of entertainment and technology companies, Professor Felten was part of a group that says it successfully disabled the system. But he said he was reluctant to make public the details of how it was done because the 1998 law made it a crime to manufacture or "offer to the public" a way to gain unauthorized access to any copyright-protected work that has been secured by a technology like encryption.

"It is not clear the extent to which we're allowed to publish our results or discuss them in public," Dr. Felten told about 400 people at Georgetown University last week at a two- day conference sponsored by the Coalition for the Future of Music. Professor Felten's dilemma traces back to last fall, when he and colleagues at Rice University and the Xerox PARC research organization participated in a challenge sponsored by a group of entertainment and technology companies that calls itself the Secure Digital Music Initiative.

The industry group is trying to design a so-called digital watermarking standard that would allow music to be distributed over the Internet while preventing it from being freely copied. To gauge the effectiveness of four proposed technologies, the group offered a $10,000 reward to be divided among participants who could remove the watermarks from the music files without compromising the quality of the sound.

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