Ed Felten
More info
- Affiliation
- Princeton, FTC, White House (OSTP)
- Known for
- The SDMI challenge, Freedom to Tinker, CITP
The Princeton professor who broke the music industry's watermarks and was then threatened with a lawsuit for explaining how.
In 2000 the industry group SDMI issued a public challenge: crack our audio watermarks. Felten's team did, and when they tried to publish, the RIAA waved the brand-new DMCA at them. The paper was eventually presented, but the episode became the textbook case of DRM law being turned on researchers. Two years earlier he had testified in the Microsoft antitrust trial, demonstrating that Internet Explorer could in fact be pulled out of Windows.
He founded Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy in 2005 and the blog Freedom to Tinker, and later served as the FTC's first chief technologist (2011) and as deputy US CTO at the White House. His doctoral students include Alex Halderman.