HD-DVD: Mockery of a sham

[andygates]

Ah but it's a funny one, isn't it?  The MPAA - the American movie copyright goons - trying to get a takedown on websites posting a number.  What number?  This number: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0.  Scary stuff, no?  But it's an encryption key, in a relatively feeble and cumbersome and egregious and misdirected technology, and because of the basic stupidity of the DMCA, it's illegal to publish.

Sorry about that.

Of course, I'm not a Yank and I'm posting in the UK and I've no idea where on Earth the Livejournal servers are or what route my blethering is taking to get to you, dear reader, but at some point in it the blunt instrument of the DMCA would probably give the MPAA's sweaty legal thugs the ability to issue a takedown.  But they did it on Digg, which has a huge userbase who were having nothing of it, and flooded Digg with postings about it.  By now there are over 300,000 pages in a Google search for the super-secret number (and of course it's also Google's cache).  Not to mention being published in formats that won't Google, like these:



That'll be a very public key then, unless the MPAA want to issue legal warnings to a lolcats site and a tattooist.  Or the person.  Is that illegal skin?  It's not digital any more - oh but this photo is, they'll try to nobble that. 

This sort of "illegal words" nonsense fundamentally fails to understand the phenomenal mobility and virulence of wired memes.  It's back to the whole "this is Rumour Control: here are the facts" approach in which an Authority presumes itself to be the source of informational goodness.  The truth is that the Authority's only special characteristic is their legal status, and that butters no parsnips with most of the world.  The Authority is only one voice in a storm of voices. 

The whole debacle is eerily reminiscent of the encryption-code farce of the mid-1990s, where source code for public/private key encryption was rated by the American Powers That Be as illegal for export or to be shown to foreign nationals - it was considered a weapon.  So of course, geeks made up T-shirts carrying the code. 

Information likes to spread.  It's teleological but close to true: good memes splurge out all over.  This damn number's on skin and in caches forever.  Trying to stem the flow of information will predictably fail given enough spread-attempts, and is just plain perverse for an industry which makes its buck from the, er, flow of information.  Insert my standard memes-make-DRM-broken-at-its-core rant here.

Comments

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I'll eschew a holy war about the virulence of memes. :)