SDMI

» see sdmi.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

There is no distance to measure with SDMI, because nobody was ever on the far side of it. It did not reach a listener in Turkey or in the United States or anywhere else. Two years of meetings produced a specification and then a threatening letter, and that is the entire consumer-facing history of the thing.

It was formed in late 1998 and launched publicly on 26 February 1999, an RIAA-convened forum with more than two hundred member companies, most of them from the labels and the consumer electronics manufacturers. Leonardo Chiariglione, who had run MPEG and therefore knew how to make a standards body actually converge on something, was brought in as executive director. The timing was not subtle: the Diamond Rio had shipped the previous autumn and the labels had already sued over it and lost, and Napster arrived four months after the launch.

The plan had two phases. Phase I was a screening technology that compliant portable players would carry, cheap enough to ship immediately. Phase II was the real weapon: a robust watermark buried in the audio itself, so that a licensed recording could be recognized wherever it went and an unlicensed copy would be refused by every compliant device on earth. Phase I shipped in a few players and nobody noticed. Phase II is what killed the organization.

~ the record ~

~ the challenge ~

On 6 September 2000, SDMI published "An Open Letter to the Digital Community" inviting hackers and cryptographers to attack six candidate technologies, four of them watermarks. Three weeks were allowed. There was a $10,000 prize per technology, conditional on signing a confidentiality agreement and handing over the rights to whatever you found.

A team led by Edward Felten at Princeton, working with people at Rice and Xerox PARC, took the challenge and declined the money, precisely so that they would stay free to publish. They defeated all four watermarks, verified by SDMI's own automated judging. This is what a public challenge is for and it worked exactly as designed. The problem was that SDMI had run the challenge expecting a different answer.

~ the letter ~

The Felten paper, "Reading Between the Lines: Lessons from the SDMI Challenge," was accepted at the Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop. In April 2001 Matthew Oppenheim, an officer of both the RIAA and SDMI, wrote to Felten warning of liability under the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act if the work were presented. On 26 April 2001 the authors withdrew the paper from the workshop.

The EFF filed suit that June on First Amendment grounds. The RIAA retreated, the Department of Justice offered assurances, and the paper was presented at USENIX Security in Washington on 15 August 2001. The case itself was dismissed that November as moot. Nothing was decided, which is the whole point: the threat achieved the delay it wanted without ever having to survive a courtroom, and every security researcher watching learned what a publication now cost.

~ what it left behind ~

SDMI announced its hiatus on 18 May 2001, and the reason Chiariglione gave later was flat and technical. None of the submitted technologies met the requirements. A watermark strong enough to survive compression and re-recording is a watermark you can hear, and a watermark you cannot hear is one that can be removed. The physics did not care how many companies were in the room.

What arrived instead was iTunes in April 2003, with a proprietary lock nobody standardized, made by a computer company rather than a consortium, and abandoned by 2009 because it turned out to be a competitive weapon and not a copyright shield. The industry never got its universal watermark. It got a decade of DMCA letters to researchers, which is the part of SDMI that outlived it.

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