Bravo Digg Personally I don’t think that DRM does anything except inconvenience legitimate users, pirates will always find a way to get the content out and it only takes one pirate to rip a movie and make it available to tens of thousands of users. I can say it sure inconvenienced me when my shiny new HD DVDs refused to play on Windows XP with WinDVD when it detected I didn’t have a HDCP compliant monitor.
Why am I posting this hex string as this blog title? I just happened to like the numbers when I saw them in a DMCA takedown notice sent by Proskauer Rose LLP on behalf of the AACS Licensing Authority. Lets forget for the moment that they’re attempting to label a number as a circumvention device. If they’re going to start putting this number in public documents I see no way they can take action against people talking about it anymore – you can’t claim that something is private knowledge when you caused it to be in the public eye (at least that’s my non-bar certified opinion). Back to the number, I know the DMCA takedown notice requires certain things in order to be used and that they had to label the number as a circumvention device in order to invoke the mighty powers of the DMCA but how can a number be a circumvention device? That’s a very good question. Now computer source code that makes use of that number could be classified as a circumvention device but where will the court system draw the line between an open source implementation of the AACS spec (based on documents the AACS has published on its website and which uses industry standard algorithms) and a circumvention device?
That my friends, is the golden question. I can only hope that if this ever becomes a case, that it makes it to a court where there is a technically competent judge or one who is willing to learn from industry veterans and not just MPAA / AACS cronies.
