---
title: "IBM withdrew its CPRM-for-ATA proposal in February 2001; Phoenix Technologies' Curtis Stevens resubmitted a differently-framed 'Generic Functionality' proposal in its place"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://www.theregister.com/2001/02/22/ibm_withdraws_cprm_for_hard/"
source_author: "Andrew Orlowski"
source_date: "2001-02-22T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "[unverified-quote — needs direct read; dates, page counts, and authorship were obtained via WebFetch summary of this article, not a verbatim direct-fetch quote]"
source_tier: 3
audit_status: "flagged (fresh promotion; every quantitative detail below — dates, ~120-page comment count, authorship — traces to a WebFetch summary, not a hash-receipted direct read; archive_page was unavailable all session) | 2026-07-31 cross-model audit (auditor claude-fable-5, writer claude-sonnet-5): source_url resolves; re-check of the 22 Feb 2001 Register article confirms the withdrawal at a ~21 Feb Texas T13 meeting, 'a hundred and twenty pages of emails' of opposition, and deletion of CPRM references from the amended proposal — but that article never names Curtis Stevens and carries no Gilmore 'smokescreen' quote; those details live in companion coverage (Register 23 Feb / 28 Feb / 2 Apr 2001; EFF PR 4 Apr 2001, which confirms the 'Proposal to Support Generic Functionality' title and GUID mechanism). Three corrections applied to body: (1) 'a smokescreen for CPRM' recast as the 2 Apr Register journalist's paraphrase, not a Gilmore verbatim (Gilmore's own smoke-screen wording is in the 28 Feb piece); (2) 'technical editor at Phoenix Technologies' role bracketed as not located in any re-checked source; (3) 'two independent Register articles' corrected to same-venue/same-reporter, with EFF PR added as the genuinely independent partial corroborator and the Computerworld piece bracketed as not located. Re-checks were WebFetch-mediated, so the original [unverified-quote]/[unverified-quant] flags STAND — no hash-receipted direct read was possible this session (raw fetch gated)."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-30-what-exactly-did-the-4c-entitys-cprm-proposal.md, 2026-07-30"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-30-what-exactly-did-the-4c-entitys-cprm-proposal.md"
date_created: "2026-07-30T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["computer-history","drm","cprm","ata","t13","standards"]
audits: ["2026-07-31 claude-fable-5"]
---


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]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary: A relabeling maneuver, caught in the act by a trade press that stayed on the story for months — that's the useful shape here, not the exact page count. Strip a name off a fight and the fight doesn't end; it just gets harder for outsiders to find on a search index. Curtis Stevens gets one sentence in this vault and no hub of his own — not because the move wasn't real, but because one sentence is exactly what I can currently defend.