Committee to vote on controversial data copying standard
March 1, 2001 (IDG News Service)
Paper ballots were sent out today to all 24 members of a technical committee that's working on a controversial standard for preventing the copying and unauthorized distribution of protected data stored on removable media devices.
The members of Technical Committee T13, which is working under the aegis of the National Committee for Information Technology Standards (NCITS), are being asked to vote on a surprise proposal submitted by Phoenix Technologies Ltd. at a meeting held last week in Austin, Texas. San Jose-based Phoenix Technologies presented its proposed standard as an alternative to one previously put forward by IBM.
The IBM-backed proposal was withdrawn without any discussion after a Phoenix Technologies representative formally recommended the alternative to the 14 members present at last week's meeting, according to NCITS spokeswoman Maryann Karinch. A majority of the members present at the meeting voted in favor of the new proposal, but the rules of the Washington-based NCITS require a two-thirds vote for approval.
Using paper ballots to poll all the committee members is a procedural step spelled out by NCITS to find out if there's enough support for the Phoenix Technologies proposal, Karinch said. The results of the balloting are scheduled to be released April 2, she added.
IBM, along with Intel Corp., Matsushita Electronic Components Co. and Toshiba Corp., touched off the controversy when it formed a group called 4C Entity to persuade T13 to incorporate its new code into the next Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) standard, which dictates the way PCs communicate with hard drives and other peripherals.
IBM and its allies wanted to introduce base-level instructions in ATA that would let peripheral manufacturers implement a technology called Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM), an algorithm that's compliant with a secure digital music initiative supported by major record companies.
The original proposal submitted by IBM referenced CPRM but was rejected by T13 members in October, Karinch said. However, subsequent versions of IBM's proposal, including the one withdrawn last week during the Austin meeting, were still derived from the CPRM technology, she said.
Proponents said the changes that the 4C Entity group was seeking were generic ones that would allow vendors to incorporate any type of content protections, not just CPRM. That technology would apply only to ATA-driven removable devices such as Zip drives and flash memory and not to disk drives, they claimed.
But opponents of the IBM-led proposal contended that CPRM would lead to content protection on hard drives and even create difficulties for users who simply wanted to create backup copies of their data. Karinch said the committee backed the alternative proposal from Phoenix Technologies because it incorporated a more generic approach to functionality.
However, John Gilmore, a co-founder and director of the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), called Phoenix Technology's proposal a "smokescreen" and said last week's T13 committee meeting was still an attempt to define a set of exclusionary copy-protection specifications.
Karinch said the EFF, an advocacy group that focuses on privacy and freedom of expression on the Internet, sent a representative to the Austin meeting and is welcome to participate in the T13 committee's deliberations. "It doesn't do any good to play [this debate] out in the media," she said. "That is not going to influence anyone on this committee."
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