IBM withdrew its CPRM-for-ATA proposal in February 2001; Phoenix Technologies' Curtis Stevens resubmitted a differently-framed 'Generic Functionality' proposal in its place

At a T13 meeting reported as occurring around 21–22 February 2001, IBM withdrew its explicit proposal to add CPRM support to the ATA hard-drive standard (claim-4c-entity-cprm-proposal-bound-content-to-specific-ata-drive), after the committee had reportedly accumulated roughly 120 pages of public comment opposing it. In its place, Curtis Stevens submitted a "Proposal to Support Generic Functionality" — the title as given in EFF's 4 April 2001 press release and The Register's 2 April 2001 report — that dropped explicit references to CPRM while preserving the generic key-exchange/GUID functionality that could still support CPRM-style copy prevention. Register coverage ties the proposal to Phoenix Technologies ("the Phoenix proposal," 23 and 28 February 2001), and a later SNIA speaker bio lists Stevens as a long-serving INCITS T13 technical editor; but the compound role description "technical editor at Phoenix Technologies" was not found in any re-checked article and stays [unverified — role description not located in cited or companion sources, 2026-07-31]. John Gilmore of the Electronic Frontier Foundation opposed the substitute: The Register's 2 April 2001 report renders his view as seeing it as "a smokescreen for CPRM" — the journalist's paraphrase, not a verbatim Gilmore quote — while its 28 February 2001 report carries a direct Gilmore statement calling the proposal a smoke-screen.

The withdraw-then-resubmit sequence itself is reported consistently across two Register articles (22 February and 2 April 2001 — same venue and same reporter, so mutually consistent rather than independent) and is partially corroborated by a genuinely independent source, EFF's 4 April 2001 press release, which confirms the substitute proposal's title and its GUID tethering mechanism but names neither Stevens nor IBM's withdrawal. A Computerworld piece from the same period has been cited in circulation but was not located on the 2026-07-31 re-check [unverified — Computerworld corroboration not yet located]. The underlying withdraw-then-resubmit pattern is not in serious doubt. But the specific dates, the page count, and the authorship detail all rest on WebFetch-mediated journalism rather than a directly-read primary record — no T13 minutes or filing was fetched — so the quantitative specifics stay [unverified-quant — needs primary], routed to question-verify-cprm-t13-rejection-4c-entity-eff. The vote this substitute proposal eventually faced is covered separately in claim-t13-rejected-generic-functionality-proposal-april-2001-supermajority-rule.