Press your 'Shift' key and get sued for $10m!

[Colin Dunstan]

SunnComm has threatened Princeton PhD student Alex Halderman with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for exposing a key weakness in the company's latest CD copy protection technology, MediaMax CD3.

The company said today it will take legal action against Halderman for revealing how MediaMax CD3 can be bypassed by holding down a Windows PC's Shift key when a protected disc is inserted

What is this world coming to.. when you can be sued for showing people how to use the shift key.

For the full story...here

[St0rmD]

and they immediately thought better of it

SunnComm Technologies, Inc. announced yesterday morning it would sue first-year graduate student John Halderman over his recent critique of the company's new CD copy-protection method, but by the end of the day SunnComm president and CEO Peter Jacobs said he changed his mind.

Jacobs said in an interview late last night that a successful lawsuit would do little to reverse the damage done by the paper Halderman published Monday about his research, and any suit would likely hurt the research community by making computer scientists think twice about researching copy-protection technology.

...

"I don't want to be the people my parents warned me to stay away from," said Jacobs of his decision. "It's 10 million bucks, but maybe I can make it back, and maybe [Halderman] can learn a little bit more about our technology so as not to call it brain dead."

[Alexander Turcic]

Halderman's paper hit SunnComm hard. Since Monday its stock value has dropped $10 million — one-third of the company's total worth.

Halderman should have shorted SunnComm stocks before making the paper public