A Princeton professor is suing the Secure Digital Music Initiative group for blocking his publication of research on cracking the security of digital music.

Professor Edward Felten and his research team, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, lodged the suit against the SDMI, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), watermark technology company Verance (which made one of the watermarks Felten's team cracked), and the U.S. Department of Justice. Felten and his team said last April they were threatened with legal action if they presented their findings from a SDMI hacking challenge.

In a statement posted on its Web site Wednesday, the RIAA said, "Professor Felten's decision to sue the RIAA and SDMI Foundation is inexplicable. We have unequivocally and repeatedly stated that we have no intention of bringing a lawsuit against Professor Felten or his colleagues."

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The statement goes on to say that Felten and the EFF are using the suit as a publicity measure and that the RIAA has "no issue with the publication of the paper."

No one at the SDMI was available for comment Wednesday afternoon.

Felten and his team were one of two groups that claimed to have successfully broken through the digital watermark technology SDMI put forth during a much-publicized hacking challenge. Felten was scheduled to present the team's watermark-busting findings and techniques at the Hiding Workshop conference last April. He chose not to do so after the SDMI sent him a letter threatening a lawsuit.

SDMI, which is both the name of the organization and the technology it is attempting to implement to make digital music secure, claimed that by presenting the findings, Felten and his team would be violating the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it illegal to provide technology that bypasses industry controls limiting how consumers can use music they have purchased.

Felten and the EFF claim that the DMCA stymies academic research and freedom that First Amendment rights should protect.

The EFF said Wednesday that it is challenging the constitutionality of the DMCA's antidistribution provisions and is asking the federal court to give Felten and his team the right to present their research at an USENIX Security Conference this August, without fearing reprisal from the record industry. The USENIX association, representing roughly 10,000 computer research scientists, is also a co-plaintiff in the case.

"We want them to pledge not to take action against the paper and all future papers as well," EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn said in a conference call Wednesday.『It's not appropriate for scientists to have to ask the industry for permission to present research.』

When asked about the RIAA's claim that it has no issue with the publishing of the paper, Cohn said that given the association's response to Felten's initial attempt to publicize his findings, she did not believe that they wouldn't try to intervene.

"They have made clear that the only way they would agree to it being presented is if it was substantially dumbed down," Cohn said.

Although the record industry supposedly wants to keep its technology secrets out of the hands of the general public, Felten contends that the paper is not a blueprint for cracking SDMI's technologies.

"The paper would be unintelligible to a lay person," Felten said.

Furthermore, Felten claims that the SDMI and RIAA's alleged efforts to keep him from publishing his research is a case of shooting the messenger.

"We are not going to change the weaknesses in the technology by publishing the paper," Felten said.『The technology is weak. It would be widely defeated, quickly.』

Felten added that the research is not only meant to benefit the scientific community, but also the record companies.

"If they are buying into this technology, they have a right to know if it actually works," Felten said.

The SDMI hacking challenge was originally meant to identify holes in the digital watermark technologies--audio marks in music files--which were intended to protect copyright materials.

"The record companies want to distribute their music in digital straight jackets but want to make it illegal to talk about whether their straight jackets work or not," Cohn said.

The true arrow of the plaintiffs' case is not aimed at the defendants, however, but at the highly charged subject of the DMCA. The DMCA makes it a crime to provide information that can sidestep copyright protection devices, which Felten and his team could be seen as doing by publishing their research.

The DMCA is also the focal point of another one of the EFF's high-publicity cases involving a magazine's publishing of a DVD descrambling source code called DeCSS (De Contents Scramble System).

EFF executives made it clear Wednesday that even if they win the fight with the record industry to let Felten publish his paper, they will continue to press against the DMCA.

The DMCA is why USENIX joined the case, saying that the association feared that it could be held criminally liable for material presented at its conferences under the act's provisions.

The plaintiffs are hoping to get a decision on the case before the August USENIX conference. They say that if the decision is delayed, it is unlikely the research would be presented without a guarantee that the scientists would be protected from litigation.

It remains to be seen how the case will proceed given the RIAA's claim that the defendants have no intention of suing the professor or his colleagues.