Great Economist article on Edward Felten, the "Tinkerer's Champion." Edward and his colleagues were sent legal threats by the RIAA when they prepared an academic presentation exposing the vulnerabilities in SDMI, a copy-prevention schemes for digital music. The EFF took up his case and made the music-bullies back down.
(When it was revealed that the current generation of CD copy-prevention tech can be defeated by scribbling over the visible rings of bad data on the disc with a marker, the joke at EFF was that our next client would be "Edward Feltpen." Update: Seth reminds me that this joke is properly attributed to Bernard Lang)
WHEN Edward Felten began a recent presentation in San Francisco on the weaknesses of copy-protection software, he did not get far. He had just put up his first slide when two FBI agents stormed the stage, handcuffed the stunned Princeton computer-science professor and arrested him—as Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian programmer, had been at a Las Vegas hackers' conference in July 2001. The mock arrest was the opening act of a panel at the 2002 Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy, a favourite get-together for tech-savvy civil libertarians, to illustrate the chilling effects of America's latest copyright law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
(Thanks, Tim!)
