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world. So let’s just be clear before we continue: It’s not a crime anywhere
(anymore) to dance jazz. Nor is it a crime to teach your dog to
dance jazz. Nor should it be a crime (though we don’t have a lot to go
on here) to teach your robot dog to dance jazz. Dancing jazz is a completely
legal activity. One imagines that the owner of aibopet.com
thought, What possible problem could there be with teaching a robot dog to
dance?
Let’s put the dog to sleep for a minute, and turn to a pony show—
not literally a pony show, but rather a paper that a Princeton academic
named Ed Felten prepared for a conference. This Princeton academic
is well known and respected. He was hired by the government in the
Microsoft case to test Microsoft’s claims about what could and could
not be done with its own code. In that trial, he demonstrated both his
brilliance and his coolness. Under heavy badgering by Microsoft
lawyers, Ed Felten stood his ground. He was not about to be bullied
into being silent about something he knew very well.
But Felten’s bravery was really tested in April 2001. 22 He and a
group of colleagues were working on a paper to be submitted at conference.
The paper was intended to describe the weakness in an encryption
system being developed by the Secure Digital Music Initiative as
a technique to control the distribution of music.
The SDMI coalition had as its goal a technology to enable content
owners to exercise much better control over their content than the Internet,
as it originally stood, granted them. Using encryption, SDMI
hoped to develop a standard that would allow the content owner to say
“this music cannot be copied,” and have a computer respect that command.
The technology was to be part of a “trusted system” of control
that would get content owners to trust the system of the Internet much
more.
When SDMI thought it was close to a standard, it set up a competition.
In exchange for providing contestants with the code to an
SDMI-encrypted bit of content, contestants were to try to crack it
and, if they did, report the problems to the consortium.
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