San Diego

Computer scientists who cancelled a talk in May because of legal threats from the recording industry delivered it in full last week at a conference in Washington.

The researchers, led by Edward Felten of Princeton University, presented their research on 15 August at the Usenix computer security conference, after the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said that it did not intend to sue them.

The team had withdrawn virtually the same paper on code-breaking from an earlier conference, fearing legal action by the RIAA under the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which prohibits certain disclosures of digital information (see Nature 411, 5; 2001).

In response to the case, a committee of faculty at Princeton will meet on 26 September to advise the university on possible policies to protect researchers' rights to publish, particularly in computer science. Some Princeton faculty have voiced concern that the university's leadership did not do enough to support the challenged researchers.

The new president of Princeton, Shirley Tilghman, was unavailable for comment. But an official at the university said that it strongly supports academic freedom, adding in a statement that university officials go "out of their way to indemnify our employees".

Members of Felten's team say that the legal threat has already impinged on their academic freedom. The group, backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a California-based lobby group that supports free speech on the Internet, is now suing the RIAA in the federal court in New Jersey.