The RIAA insists this battle is about promises - Felten promised, the RIAA says, not to release his results except under the terms the industry group set. But this misses the point. The group thinks that Congress, through the DMCA, has given it the right to control who does what research and when. If a scientist does research that the RIAA doesn't like, its lawyers believe they can then threaten that scientist with criminal prosecution. But unlike copyright law, the only people who get to study this code are the people the codewriters permit.
Someone's on the wrong planet here.
The copyright thugs don't get this. But pirates don't publish in academic journals. And everything that might help a pirate is not a crime. The Felten affair is one more example of why it is a mistake to hand over copyright policy to industry lawyers. Yet the sad fact is that this is just what Congress's DMCA has done.