Angered by the music industry's bid to close down Napster and MP3.com, a group of computer hackers are organizing a boycott of a competition to win $10,000

Angered by the music industry's bid to close down Napster and MP3.com, a group of computer hackers are organizing a boycott of a competition to win $10,000 hacking new copyright-protection software being developed by major record labels. "I won't do your dirty work for you," Don Marti, technology editor for Linux Journal, wrote in an open letter posted on the magazine (www.linuxjournal.com) for programmers of the shared-code software called Linux. Marti's comments echo the sentiments of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group, and other so-called open-source software advocates, who have called for a boycott of the industry's hacking contest offer, posted last week by the Secure Digital Music Initiative. The "big five" major record labels are all founding members of SDMI. The record labels seek to woo hackers to help them in building a program to defend copyrights against other hackers. The labels, in court against music-sharing Web-sites such as Napster Inc. and MP3.com Inc., are hoping to build a program which will defeat the song-swappers for good. In the contest, which runs through Oct. 7, SDMI has placed six sample files on its site available for downloading and hacking. The files are programs which SDMI hopes will screen for pirated copies of music. But Linux Journal's Marti said that many expert hackers, including hacking superstars who cracked the encryption codes on DVDs, had agreed not to participate in SDMI's challenge. The boycott's backers object to the SDMI effort, saying it limits consumers' "fair use" rights to the music they buy, such as making personal copies to use in a car stereo or lap-top computer, or making copies for education and criticism. But programmers say SDMI's Digital Music Access Technology, or DMAT, code will not be broken in the three weeks allotted. Marti said the DMAT code provided on a Web site is not enough information for a successful crack - programmers also need to examine the SDMI compatible hardware, such as CD players, which are not yet on the market. He also said he thinks expert hackers with the ability to crack the code will stay away from the contest.