Look at me! I've got the number!

Last night the social news site digg.com underwent a user revolt. Digg ended some user accounts, removed certain posts and reset "diggs" because of a 16-digit hexadecimal number used to lock HD-DVD movies. This number, known as a "processing key", is said to be discovered months ago by muslix64.

Digg supposedly received a legal take-down notice from the AACS Licensing Authority, a body which controls the underlying HD-DVD anti-copying technology. So Digg began taking down stories that included the number. Digg users did not like this and every story on the front page became about and/or included this number. Users "dugg" the hell out of these stories. Digg admins then reset some of the digg counts, maybe because they were getting to high. Users came back with more and more "number" related "stories".

At about 9 pm, Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, caved to the pressure:

. . . 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 down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

This statement seems to have quieted the protest, but it may come at the expense of the entire site. BoingBoing.net offers this possible workaround to save the site:

I think another way of doing this would be to take down each user post on receipt of a takedown notice, then post PDFs of each takedown notice that he received in their place, which PDFs will contain the magic number. That way, the information stays alive and Digg doesn't get sued. I'm not a lawyer, but this has been the strategy I've pursued with my class blog, which received a takedown for the same number.

Suppressing the number has proved fruitless so far. A google search currently lists over 30,000 instances of the number.

This is primarily a tech issue but Christopher Mercer blogs about it in a more political light:

This is a perfect example of both DRM and the DMCA at its worst. It is a tenant of copyright law that words and numbers cannot be copyrighted, they could be trademarked, but not copyrighted. It is exactly these kinds of draconian laws that the US is pressuring on other countries, and exactly the kinds of laws the current government is considering introducing as part of its copyright reform. If you reverse engineer, find a security hole, or discover a way to break encryption that is applied to copyrighted material you can be prevented form sharing that information with laws like the DMCA. This is exactly what has happened with the HD-DVD processing key and many other products such as the DeCSS code that allows DVD playback. It leaves a chilling effect on those who wish to build a better lock by understanding how to break the current one, a process often pursued in academics.

-Dippold

Political Online Reputation