Secure Digital Music Initiative

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Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) was a forum formed in late 1998, composed of more than 200 IT, consumer electronics, security technology, ISP and recording industry companies, ostensibly with the purpose of developing technology specifications that protected the playing, storing and distributing of digital music.

Specifically, the goals of the SDMI were to provide consumers with convenient access to music online and in new digital distribution systems, to enable copyright protection for the work of artists, and to promote the development of new music-related business and technologies. SDMI was a direct response to the widespread success of the MP3 file format.

1 Method
2 The SDMI Challenge
3 Demise
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Method

The strategy for the SDMI group involved two stages. Firstly to implement a secure digital watermarking scheme. This would allow music to be tagged with a secure watermark that was hard to remove from the source audio without damaging it. The second stage was to ensure that SDMI compliant players (see the SDMI Portable Device Specification) wouldn't play SDMI tagged music that wasn't authorised for that device. The reasoning was that even if the files were distributed they couldn't be played as the device would detect the music wasn't authorised to played on it.

[edit] The SDMI Challenge

A key part of the strategy included demonstrating that the watermarking couldn't be detected by 3rd parties and as a result be removed from the music. As part of the process of ratifying the technology the SDMI announced a challenge with their Open Letter to the Digital Community on September 6, 2000. The letter invited hackers, cryptologists and similar talents to detect and remove the water mark from some example pieces of music. Several groups got involved including a group led by Ed Felten. Felten's group claimed to have cracked the scheme and successfully removed the watermark according to the automated judging software supplied by the SDMI. The SDMI disagreed noting that there was a requirement that the files lose no sound quality and the automated system did not take this into account.

When Felten attempted to publish a academic paper describing the analysis of the SDMI scheme (having opted out of the confidentiality requirement that would have allowed him to claim the prize money) the SDMI, RIAA and Verance Corporation threatened legal action under the auspices of the DMCA. The controversy about stifling of academic research resonated through scientific and cryptography circles until his paper was eventually published in 2001 after assurances from the Justice Department that the DMCA wouldn't be used to stifle legitimate research.

[edit] Demise

On October 15th 1999 Eric Scheirer—later a digital music analyst for Forrester Research—wrote an editorial for MP3.com titled The End of SDMI, which declared that the group's true goal to fold the technology industry into an alliance that would guarantee the record industry's near monopoly over musical content had failed. The detailed argument he posed in his essay was compelling enough to draw a rebuttal from the president of the SDMI, Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione. Scheirer's comments proved to be correct; the SDMI has been inactive since May 18, 2001. ^[1]

In the end the failure of SDMI could be attributed to several factors. There was unease that the technology was actually secure enough for production use, something which resonates with the debate over DRM today. There was also friction between the music industry and the consumer electronics industry over who would pay for the costs of implementing the technology in hardware (which from a consumer point of view would reduce functionality as non-SDMI devices would ignore any watermarks).