Leonardo Chiariglione responds:

Sometimes it is hard to let facts get in the way of a good story. As executive director of SDMI, let me give you some of the facts:

1) It is simply impossible for anybody to have carried out the checks necessary to verify that watermarking had indeed been removed without damage to the music between the time the Testing Management Committee received information and the publication of the Salon.com article.

2) As I am sure you have noticed, your anonymous source carefully shifted the use of tense from past tense in the first paragraph, to the present and then future tenses in the second paragraph. This shift in tense confirms exactly what SDMI has been saying: At this point in time we are still evaluating collected information. No one can confirm the results your anonymous source originally reported, because tests are still underway. Like your source, we simply do not know yet what those results will be.

3) The speculation that your anonymous source is making about what is going to happen next is mere idle gossip. Serious people in SDMI, starting with the executive director, are focusing efforts on the tasks at hand, not on idle speculation.

Leonardo Chiariglione
executive director, SDMI

Matt Oppenheim:

I'm speaking on behalf of the RIAA.

In your last article you wrote about how the record companies are running scared, emergency meetings, those kinds of things. It's so far from the truth -- it's not factually accurate, it's a perception, but it's not a fair perception. Record companies have been very strong proponents from the get-go of this public challenge. We want to know whether the technologies under consideration are viable. For us to be trying to hide the results would be counter to that desire.

The issue of success is really an interesting one. In your original article, the source told you that all the technologies have been successfully hacked. Now they say it's all based on how you define success. It's clear to me that the reason that SDMI agreed on a process that includes listening and repeatability tests is that the entire process has to be gone through before you [declare success]. SDMI has defined what success is -- and success means that something has to go through all three stages of our testing. Because if something just goes through the [the first part of the testing, which checks if the watermarks have been removed] it could just be that the hacker has erased all the music too, or slowed it down to half its normal speed. And so you go through the listening test, too.

As for the issue of two out of the three listeners being record industry people, that's not something that we're defensive about; just as we're having the IT people provide analysis of the robustness of technology because that's what they do; record companies deal with audibility, so that's what we do. We have required that the listening is blind; it's not like record companies have control of it.

A confidentiality agreement for members of the testing committee is a necessary requirement in order to maintain a process that is fair for the proponents. There was a conference call today discussing it and hopefully everybody will be fine with it. It's important that as we go through this process that you create a process that fairly considers the needs of the proponents. These companies have submitted their technology to testing, the testing has a set-out regimen and process -- to release data that is incomplete and that you've agreed that you won't release would be inappropriate and could potentially be harmful to a proponent.

There is no data that has been released to SDMI that confirms that [all six watermarks were cracked]. The process that was agreed upon, and process is very important for legal reasons, was that we would do these tests with three different steps, and until we completed those tests we would keep them confidential. Either somebody has leaked information to you which they shouldn't, or logically they are telling you something of which they have no idea. I happen to know that there are very limited numbers of people who have the complete data, and none of those people with complete data have talked to you.

Note: This story has been corrected since its original publication.

Recent Stories