Specifically, the goals of the SDMI were to provide consumers with convenient access to music online and in new digital distribution systems, to enable copyright protection for the work of artists, and to promote the development of new music-related business and technologies. SDMI was a direct response to the widespread success of the MP3 file format.
SDMI are most known for their SDMI challenge which was announced on September 6, 2000 in their Open Letter to the Digital Community. In this letter they invited hackers, cryptologists and similar talents to try to crack their proposed digital watermarking scheme. This challenge resulted in the protection schemes being cracked wide open, and worse: they were fundamentally flawed, so that any device implementing an algorithm based on the same reasoning would inevitably be cracked, too.
We don't know for sure what the intended goals of the challenge were, but presumably SDMI had expected their watermarking scheme to be bullet-proof and impossible to crack, or if it was crackable: that it could be amended so that it would become uncrackable. The actual outcome of the SDMI challenge: that the entire concept was flawed, was certainly not expected news.
The SDMI has also published the SDMI Portable Device Specification.
The SDMI has been inactive since May 2001.
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