In short, someone found the HD-DVD encryption hex code which can essentially strip an HD-DVD of its DRM. It’s a big deal to the geeks and the geek wannabe herd (i.e. idiots who don’t even know what to do with the code) so it was front-paged on Digg. Digg received a cease-and-desist order shortly after (HD-DVD is also one of the site’s advertisers) and started to delete comments and stories that mentioned the hex code. Geeks and the herd got pissed.
I’m leaving this thread open because it’s a good topic for discussion; however, please be sure not to link to the key in question. While other sites may have the resources or the desire to fight a potential lawsuit, the SDMB has not made such claims.
I also edited the title to make it less ambiguous.
The MPAA will huff and puff and threaten to sue your house down if you have possession of the key.
They did exactly the same thing with DeCSS code. In the middle of their tirade, Copyleft started selling ‘No CSS’ shirts with the first page of the code on the back. The shirt came packaged with a print out of the complete DeCSS code.
The MPAA huffed and puffed and threatened to sue the house down of anyone who had the code.
Well, I’ve had my shirt for six years. No word from the MPAA.
The impish side of me wants to post a poem I just created.
It’s a list of decimal numbers that represent the hex numbers of the code, minus the number of the line they’re on. (The first line is, therefore, 8.) I might consider recording a dramatic reading of this poem, and placing it on a website.
Don’t worry. I won’t really post it on the SDMB. I wouldn’t do that to this place. But I gotta say, the idea that a fucking number can apparantly be copyrighted (or whatever) is completely fucking insane.
It does seem absurd like that, I agree, but then again anything at all can be reduced to a set of numbers - the content itself on a DVD is stored as just a bunch of ones and zeroes, so unless you’re opposed to the concept of copyright in quite a broad sense, it is in fact reasonable that some sequences of numbers (or what they mean) can be copyrighted.
I’m not trying to argue that “the copy of Spiderman 3 on my harddrive is just a number, your honor” is a good argument. But, as you say, anything can be represented by (I don’t like the phrase “reduced to” here) a sequence of numbers.
With the proper format for decoding, the MPAA’s IP address is equivalent to a college essay of mine. That doesn’t mean I can sue them for copyright violation. It would be absurd of me to argue that since their IP (Internet Protocol) is really my IP (intellectual property) in disguise, that they can’t use the number. They can use the number all they want. I shouldn’t be able to stop anyone from reproducing that number.
Now, if someone uses some software to read their IP and that software then follows some format or protocol and thereby recreates my intellectual property, then they’ve violated my copyright rights. I might not like people distributing their IP, but I wouldn’t feel any moral or legal right to make them stop.
I know there are a number of philosophical and moral issues I’m glossing over here, but I think the idea that a number in itself is copyrightable is silly.
I’m annoyed, but not at the owners of Digg. I’m annoyed at the frothing-at-the-mouth, “information wants to be free!” lunatics who participated in the ‘riot’ to begin with.
Before the site went down, pretty much every story on the front page was the key, and a rant blasting Digg. What the hell do these people expect Digg to do, ignore the cease-and-desist and risk a costly legal battle? All over an encryption key for some of the latest shit coming out of Hollywood? I guess that’s it - after all, it’s not their money, and their business.
The whole thing strikes me as recreational outrage, although of a different sort than people complain about on here. I wonder how many people are genuinely angry about it, and how many are just thinking “Ooh, here’s something that I can bitch about!”
The posts about copyright are misguided: so far as I know, the MPAA hasn’t made any copyright issue out of the number, they simply consider it a device for circumventing access controls, and thus restricted under the DMCA.
That having been said, of all the things one could try to remove from public view once it’s out there and there’s an interest in it, a mere 128 bits seems ridiculously infeasible.
Also, one of the aspects of the controversy, probably the major aspect, was that Digg was censoring stories which didn’t mention the number, but which merely mentioned the fact that Digg had censored earlier stories on the number.
I believe the traditional admonition against relying on security through obscurity only refers to the algorithm being used for the encryption, not the specific key.
Am I mistaken that this one key can be used to unlock every one of these DVDs? That’s security by obscurity. It’d be a different story if you had to know a different key for every DVD: sure, if you know that key, you’ll unlock that DVD. It’s different if one key will unlock everything: you’re just one successful social engineering experiment away from your whole scheme failing, not to mention successful code hacks.
Security through obscurity is not the problem here. The problem is that the MPAA doesn’t want us to have the key to our encrypted DVDs - but we need to have the key, in order to play them. So, they’re trying to give us the key, without actually giving it to us - which is ridiculous. The key is hidden somewhere in the player software, and if the software can retrieve the key in order to decrypt the DVD, so can we.
