On Thursday, a frustrated Felten said he decided against releasing the information because of the potential for lawsuits against the researchers, their schools and conference organizers. He did not say what he would do next. Lawyers for Princeton and the recording industry had been negotiating for a week on whether Felten could present the research for public review. The industry wanted to see it first. Felten said his team disabled five of six electronic signatures that had been added to recordings as inaudible background noise.
Watermarks are a type of steganography, wherein a message is hidden within another message.
Steganography is unlike encryption, a more processing-intensive software tool that encodes digital information in a secure format. Encrypted data can only be decoded with a mathematically generated key. We are interested in understanding how this technology works. These are costly measures, and there is no reason to deploy them if they don't work. Felten said the team's preliminary findings have been leaked and published on Internet sites, but not by him or the other authors.