AACS Key Crack Leads to Online Uproar
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It might well go down as the most popular 32-digit hexadecimal number in history. It forced Digg to shut down temporarily, has appeared on T-shirts, in photos, tattoos, and at least one song. It’s been the cause of more cease-and-desist take-down letters than you can shake a stick at. Keep reading to learn more about the controversy.
The story, as near as I can determine, actually starts in mid-February. That's when a poster to the Doom9 forum with the handle of arnezami reported that he'd figured out how to crack the DRM protection on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks. Basically, the crack extracts the “processing key” from a high-definition DVD player. The DRM protection is supposed to prevent high-definition DVDs from being copied; once that protection is cracked, it’s easy to copy the disks both for legal (fair use) and illegal purposes.
Now let’s fast forward to mid-April. That’s when the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) Licensing Administrator began threatening to sue sites that posted the 32-digit number. They’re the organization that administers the now-cracked technology. The cease-and-desist letter, which has been posted at ChillingEffects.org and elsewhere, complains that the particular site (and there must have been dozens posting the code by this time) is “providing and offering to the public a technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof that is primarily designed, produced, or marketed for the purpose of circumventing the technological protection measures afforded by AACS” which “constitutes a violation of the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the "DMCA"), 17 U.S.C. §§ 1201(a)(2) and 1201(b)(1).” The letter demands that the site remove the offending posting, refrain from having it posted again, and adds that failing to do so “will subject you to legal liability.”
For many sites, this was not a big deal; they took down the offending postings to avoid getting sued. For Digg, however, the situation wasn’t quite so simple. Digg’s administrators tried to take down the posts containing the string of letters and numbers, but the web 2.0 site’s outspoken community refused to be censored. They submitted literally thousands of stories containing the verboten numbers, until at one point every technology story on the site included the string.
Finally, on the evening of May 1, Digg co-founder Kevin Rose bowed to the pressure of the community. After the site shut down for some time, it came back up, and the stories about the crack reappeared. As Rose explained in his blog, “after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow to a bigger company…whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.”
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