What started as a debate over the Internet community's participation in an SDMI challenge to hackers has escalated into an argument over SDMI's mission and whether its technology violates consumer rights regarding the fair use of copyrighted content.

At the heart of the debate is a question of whether consumers should pay for digital content on a per-use basis, and whether existing laws concerning fair use of copyrighted works apply to the digital domain. That argument is likely to intensify over the next few years as broadband technology becomes pervasive, enabling online access to digital music, books and video content.

"The battle is hottest in music right now, but it will heat up in books, games and movies as well," said Shari Steele, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (San Francisco), a non-profit group that seeks to protect civil liberties such as individual privacy and freedom of expression in the world of computers and the Internet. Steels said the EFF is troubled by what it views as SDMI's attempt to limit consumer access to and use of digital music content.

The battle began last month when SDMI posted a challenge to hackers on a new Web site, www.hacksdmi.org, and offered $10,000 to anyone who could break the protection technology that SDMI is proposing as its Phase 2 screening technology. The challenge coincides with SDMI's own technology bake-off, wherein four technologies are vying to protect Internet audio devices from unauthorized copying, sharing and use of digital music content. SDMI said it issued the hacker challenge to help determine the robustness of the proposed technologies.

Three days after SDMI initiated the challenge, the EFF asked hackers to boycott SDMI's contest in EFFector, its online newsletter.

"We question the motives of SDMI, which has indicated an interest in severely limiting your ability to listen to digital recordings in your favorite format and in undermining all attempts at non-SDMI-compliant music distribution models," the EFF wrote.

In this same time frame, Linux Journal posted a letter on its Web site calling for a boycott of the contest.

After EFF issued its letter, SDMI contacted EFF and the two groups met last Monday (Sept. 25) to discuss the issue.

SDMI insists the EFF's characterization of its motives and technology is wrong. SDMI 's executive director Leonardo Chiariglione issued a statement last Thursday (Sept. 28) to clarify what he called "misconceptions" about SDMI's technology.

SDMI's technology allows people to make an unlimited number of personal copies of CDs they already have in their possession, and will eventually let consumers access more music, Chiariglione said in his statement.

"What will be affected," he wrote, "is the ability to make large numbers of perfect digital copies and distribute them instantaneously over the Internet without compensating the copyright holder."

Linux Journal promptly issued a response to SDMI's Sept. 28 letter, and EFF said it is preparing its own response. Despite last Monday's meeting, EFF's Steele said she "still has major concerns" about SDMI's technology.

Statements in Chiariglione's letter designed to clear up misconceptions about SDMI's technology are "misleading," Steele said.

"They give the impression that SDMI will decide content usage rules, when in fact it will be the content owners that make those decisions," she said.

In other words, it is not SDMI but content owners — the major record labels — that will limit the number of copies of content that can be made. SDMI merely provides the framework for the tool that checks the rules specified by the content owners Steele said.

EFF also differs with the SDMI spec's scope — it only applies to SDMI-compliant content — and with its requirement that such content always remain protected. The spec is based on the notion that "everyone is out to steal," Steele said.

The SDMI spec also offers no chance for competing business models, leading Steele to call SDMI a "cartel" controlled by the content owners.

Reached by phone, Chiariglione said he believes "there is insufficient understanding if what we [SDMI] are doing. When we say that people can buy a CD and make copies of a file they rip from the CD, we mean it," said Chiariglione. "It's not the record labels that will determine that."

Chiariglione admitted that the issues EFF is discussing are complex and involve a whole spectrum of civil liberties regarding digital content that are much larger than the concerns of SDMI. "We are just a small portion of it," he said.

Chiariglione suggested that record labels, the movie industry, publishers, lawyers and politicians should meet to hash out issues related to digital content and the rights of authors and consumers. But Chiariglione, who has spent 12 years building bridges between technology constituencies, first as leader of the initial MPEG body and more recently with SDMI, said he wouldn't have time to organize such an event.