Student faces suit over key to CD locks

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () computerbytesman com>]

http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5089168.html?tag=nefd_top

Student faces suit over key to CD locks
Last modified: October 9, 2003, 2:01 PM PDT
By John Borland 
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
           
SunnComm Technologies, a developer of CD antipiracy technology, said
Thursday that it will likely sue a Princeton student who early this week
showed how to evade the company's copy protection by pushing a computer's
Shift key. 

Princeton Ph.D. student John "Alex" Halderman published a paper on his Web
site on Monday that gave detailed instructions on how to disarm the SunnComm
technology, which aims to block unauthorized CD copying and MP3 ripping. The
technology is included on an album by Anthony Hamilton that was recently
distributed by BMG Music. 

On Thursday, SunnComm CEO Peter Jacobs said the company plans legal action
and is considering both criminal and civil suits. He said it may charge the
student with maligning the company's reputation and, possibly, with
violating copyright law that bans the distribution of tools for breaking
through digital piracy safeguards. 

"We feel we were the victim of an unannounced agenda and that the company
has been wronged," Jacobs said. "I think the agenda is: 'Digital property
should belong to everyone on the Internet.' I'm not sure that works in the
marketplace." 
The cases are already being examined by some intellectual-property lawyers
for their potential to test the extremes of a controversial copyright law
that block the distribution of information or software that breaks or
"circumvents" copy-protection technologies. 

Several civil and criminal cases based on the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act have been filed against people who distributed information or software
aimed at breaking through antipiracy locks. In one, Web publisher Eric
Corley was banned by a federal judge from publishing software code that
helped in the process of copying DVDs. 

In a criminal case, Russian company ElcomSoft was cleared of charges that it
had distributed software that willfully broke through Adobe Systems' e-book
copy protection. 

Both of those cases dealt with software or software code, however. The issue
in Halderman's case is somewhat different. 
In his paper, published on the Princeton Web site on Monday, the student
explained that the SunnComm technique relies on installing antipiracy
software directly from the protected CD itself. However, this can be
prevented by stopping Microsoft Windows' "auto-run" feature. That can be
done simply by pushing the Shift key as the CD loads. 
If the CD does load and installs the software, Halderman identified the
driver file that can be disabled using standard Windows tools. Free-speech
activists said the nature of Halderman's instructions--which appeared in an
academic paper, used only functions built into every Windows computer, and
were not distributed for profit--meant they would not fall under DMCA
scrutiny. 

....

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