AACS Key Crack Leads to Online Uproar - The Social Issue

The DMCA is not exactly popular with many tech savvy people for a number of reasons. It seems to enshrine a sort of contradiction. You see, it’s perfectly legal to make a personal copy of a CD that contains copyrighted material; that’s fair use. But it’s only legal so long as that CD doesn’t contain copy protection technology. It’s illegal to do this if the CD or DVD is copy-protected. Yet from the perspective of copyright laws, the two enjoy the same level of protection!

In other words, you could have two identical copies of the same movie or music or other copyrighted material on DVD, but if one of them is copy-protected, you’re committing a crime by circumventing the copy protection to make a copy of it for personal use. You’re NOT committing a crime if you copy the unprotected one for the same purposes.

If you think that’s a little absurd, consider this: what the AACS LA is trying to do is put the cat back in the bag. The information it was hoping to hide is now everywhere on the Internet – and the more takedown letters it sends out trying to hide it, the more widespread the string is likely to become. What’s really crazy is that we’ve seen this kind of thing happen before.

We only need to go back as far as 1999 to DVD Jon, who created DeCSS, a piece of software that could decrypt certain copy-protected DVDs. While the Motion Picture Association of America succeeded in taking online hacker magazine 2600 to court and forcing it to stop linking to DeCSS, to this day you can easily find the code online. A search of Google using the term DeCSS turns up more than 700,000 hits, including a very nicely put together page from a .edu site.

The fact is, once something is on the Internet, it is almost impossible to recall. But taking another perspective, Ed Felten, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University, offers this insight into why the AACS LA’s approach will eventually fail: “Their end goal is (or should be) to stop unauthorized online distribution of high-def video files ripped from HD-DVD or Blu-ray discs. The files in question are enormous and cumbersome to store and distribute, containing more than a gigabyte of content. If you can’t stop distribution of these huge files, surely there’s no hope of stopping distribution of a little sixteen-byte key, or even of decryption software containing the key.”