At every step of the way, SDMI has schemed to keep this information from becoming publicly available.

True, but you can't blame them for it. Security through obfuscation is still security. The only problem is that such methods eventually fall to reverse-engineering anyway. And for something like digital music, the incentive to reverse-engineer it would have been very strong with a great many people. The SDMI folks are lucky to have had this stuff aired before it got implemented in a bunch of expensive new hardware and then been embarassed about it.

Now we're back to the root of the problem which is that the current distribution medium for music (Audio CDs) is unencrypted. SDMI hoped to implement a system that could continue ot use CDs as a primary distribution medium. Audio watermarking was promising, it's too bad they couldn't make it work. I think this proves that, in order to truly copy protect music, you need a completely different method of transport and distribution. Something heavily encrypted that requires licensed hardware to decode. DVDs took a decent stab at it, but the encryption key wasn't strong enough and they didn't police their licensees closely enough, hence DeCSS...

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Tony Fabris