Today we filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to rule that the publication of our paper would be legal. See the Electronic Frontier Foundation's web site for more information.
Princeton University has issued the following statement:
The University is extremely supportive of Professor Felten and the team's
efforts to publish this paper. We will continue to provide assistance to our
faculty and students who have initiated this suit and to their attorneys,
and look forward to a favorable ruling.
The RIAA and SDMI now say that they never intended to sue us, and that they never even threatened us in the first place. This letter sure looked like a threat to us.
Verance has not rescinded their threat to sue if we publish.
The letter from RIAA refers to a "click-through agreement" that we would supposedly be violating if we published. We believe that nothing in that agreement would prohibit us from publishing our paper. Read the click-through agreement and judge for yourself.
We have decided not to proceed with our planned presentation at the Pittsburgh conference. Edward W. Felten read a statement at the conference explaining our decision.
We will continue to fight for free speech, and for our right to publish this paper. Future announcements regarding the status of our paper will be posted here.
We have created a mailing list for people who are interested in receiving any announcements relating to the status of our paper. (This is designed to save you from having to re-check our Web site to see whether anything has changed.) To subscribe, send email to majordomo@cs.princeton.edu; the message body should contain the line "subscribe sdmi-paper-info".
Brief announcement of our results
Response to SDMI Press Release, Nov. 8, 2000
Frequently asked questions (from November, 2000)
Our paper describing the results of our study was accepted for publication and was to have appeared in the Proceedings of the Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop. The workshop was held in Pittsburgh, April 25-27, 2001.