EFF and Dvorak Blame the Digg Revolt On Lawyers

enharmonix writes "A bit of an update on the recent Digg revolt over AACS. The NYTimes has taken notice and written quite a decent article that actually acknowledges that the take-down notices amount to censorship and documents instances of the infamous key appearing in purely expressive form. I was pleased to see the similarity to 2600 and deCSS was not lost on the Times either. More interesting is that the EFF's Fred von Lohmann blames the digg revolt on lawyers. And in an opinion piece, John Dvorak expands on that theme."

By no means are my defending lawyers

esp. the business/IP type.. but don't the EFF have/employ a lot of lawyers?

You might be a Redneck AACS lawyer if...

you digg your own grave rather than rob anothers.

Re:By no means are my defending lawyers

Well, they aren't blaming ALL lawyers, obviously.

Maybe a better thing to blame is "lawyer-like approaches" to this sort of problem.

Yeah, yeah...

Blame the lawyers instead of figuring out a reasonable approach to DRM that doesn't burden the consumers while protecting the producers. The worst part is that some of these now blamed lawyers will run for Congress to make a bigger mess.

Re:Yeah, yeah...

I agree that lawyers are not to blame for this. Lawyers are normally hired by an organization, and assigned to whatever issue it is that the organization hired them for. Hacking at the branches of the tree will not solve anything.

Other than that, however, I have to disagree. As far as I can tell, there is no "reasonable" DRM. "Reasonable" DRM is a paradox. It would defeat its own purpose. No, I believe all DRM, no matter how cute and cuddly it may seem to be (*ahem* FairPlay), should be completely outlawed. It serves only one purpose: the circumvention of fair use, yet it is cloaked as an "anti-piracy" measure. In my mind, the only solution to the problem is to ban it, and prosecute those companies that do not comply.

Re:Yeah, yeah...

As for the lawyers, they were just being lawyers.

When the bottom fell out of the Internet Boom, and all those startups, which had beem generating constant stream of contracts, and privacy policies, and mergers, and all sorts of legal documents, all went under. Well not all of them, but enough of them. Probably half of the slashdot audience worked for at least one...

So all of a sudden, no one had new contracts. No one was buying out the new startups. No one really new what all those lawyers in the company's legal department really did. And all the people gettling layed off were particularly curious why their team was decimated (heh.. like the music industry), when there were so many lawyers sitting around doing nothing. So they had to justify themselves. And.. well... you know. The Constitution never explicitly granted the right to duplicate copyrighted materials on the Internet. Not explicitly (how could it have?). It didn't deny those rightseither, which technically is how it works for most things... but I digress. Where was I...

Right. So everyone putting anything online was surely violating someone's copyright or trademark, and later when people started putting programs online, they could violate patents! Woohoo! Paperwork galore! And lawyers LOOOOOVES them some paperwork!

I got a C&D way back in 1995. I had a web page with a live camera looking at a [CENSORED} Lamp that I had on my desk. And I mistakingly titled the page "Check out my Groovy [CENSORED] Lamp!" and had a flowery background and that lame sort of slang we think our parents used to say. After a while I got a cease and decist from ... how should i say it... "Lava Lamp" is a trademark of Haggerty Enterprises. And I was apparently causing irreparable harm by having called my Lava Lamp (TM of Haggerty Enterprises) a Lava Lamp, and having pictures of it on the Internet. I was in a hurry, so I did a search/replace of "Lava" with "[CENSORED]" and left it at that.

So anyway, I guess the writing was on the wall, but I didn't see it yet. But that's what lawyers were doing on the internet before anyone was really even looking at it.

Move forward to 2000, and now there's millions of lawyers that need to make themselves useful in the quickest and easiest way possible. Hypothetically, I mean.

I hope that covers my ass...

Re:Yeah, yeah...

The Constitution never explicitly granted the right to duplicate copyrighted materials on the Internet.

Neither the American Constitution nor the Bill of Rights "grant" rights. The "enumerate" them--that is, "specify one after another; list".

The 9th Amendment to the Constitution specifically states, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." And the 10th Amendment states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people."

Ergo, anything that is not forbidden to the people is permitted. Anything that is not permitted to the United States or the several States is forbidden.

A "right" in the Framer's language is either endowed by God, or in secular terms is a political condition necessary for the life of a morally autonomous being, in precisely the same sense that light is a physical condition necessary for the life of a photosynthesising being. One can neither "grant" nor "deny" the necessity of light to a photosynthesising being--because that is simply a fact about the being. If you take the light away, or give it in inappropriate amounts and times and spectra, the being will not thrive. The same is true, on the secular view, of rights.

Re:Yeah, yeah...

I agree they're harmful.

But banning is not required. They are attempting to do something which is fundamentally imposible anyway. They want to hand over to you encrypted content, a complete implementation of the decryption-algorithm AND all needed keys, and nevertheless prevent you from decrypting the data.

That does not work. Bruce Schneier said it best: Trying to make bits non-copiable is about as likely to suceed as an attempt to make water not wet.

All that is needed for the free market to dismantle such crap by itself is to let it.

That is -- remove any and all laws that protect these mechanisms. Kill the DMCA, basically.

DRM ain't dangerous. It won't and can't work.

DRM combined with laws preventing their removal and/or breakage is *very* dangerous.

Re:Yeah, yeah...

Can you really blame them, what with all the newfound name recognition?

But better: Its freaking working! Here I was thinking that nothing I do can change the system. Then we add a few numbers in our sigs, and what have you, and now Dvorak is spouting off stuff that actually makes sense for once! ;)

"The music industry is decimated" (John D.). Hellaf'in yeah, it is! I don't buy CDs anymore. I don't "steal" music either. I boycott it. I started boycotting the RIAA labels and their artists when Napster (the real one) got taken down. And now, only 8 years later, the mainstream press is getting the message. Napster (the REAL one) wasn't hurting anyone, or hurting business models. When Napster was running, CDs were selling like never before. When Napster went down, CD sales started to drop. There is no data that says otherwise, and the RIAA's own reported stats show it.

Even digg.com is going to become a household word over this. And just yesterday, my dad would have sworn "digging" is something you do with a shovel.

When "exploit ignorance through rampant douchebaggery" stops being the primary business model operating in the US (and I do think its primarily here, in the US), I'll be much, much happier.

Ah, yes, the douchebag Dvorak

Ah, yes, "The music industry is decimated". LOL.

Now I know that it meant something different back in the Roman times, from which we inherited the word, but nowadays "decimated" means something a lot more drastic. You know, massive destruction. As in, "the population of Europe was decimated by the plague in the late middle ages." (When some documented outbreaks wiped out as much as 80% of a city's population, and, as statistics flukes often work, some smaller villages saw 100% deaths and became ghost villages.)

Did the music industry suffer anything even remotely callable "decimation". On what data do you or Dvorak base such statements? All the sales data I've seen indicated a steady, but relatively unspectacular decline in number of CDs sold, not some devastating dive at the end of Napster. And it becomes even less so when you consider how many people bought at least one track from an album on, say, iTunes, as basically the equivalent of one CD sale lost. Those people poached the one track that interested them, and are not gonna buy the whole CD now.

And let's be serious for a minute. If you think teenagers will start protesting DMCA en masse instead of trying to be fashionable among their peers, I have a nice waterfront property in Sahara to sell. Are you interested? I mean, heh, seriously, 90% of the high school population lives, dresses, eats and buys music based 100% on peer tastes. Even if they go for the rebellious independent teenager image, it's the exact image that their peers want to see. If among their peers it's fashionable to be a Britney Spears fan and have all her albums, that's what they'll do.

"There is no data that says otherwise"... actually, there is plenty.

1. Even if Napster went down, other P2P networks exist and existed. And by all estimates I've seen, the usage is rising steadily. Plus both pre- and post-napster there were pirate websites, ftp sites, binaries newsgroups, etc. What was so special about Napster among them? Why would piracy on Napster improve sales, but piracy on other networks cause sales to drop? Because that's what you're asking me to believe there, if Napster's death was single-handedly responsible for decimating the music business.

2. Last I've heard, most of the decline pre- or post-Napster also suspiciously correlated for a long while with a decline in the number of albums published. You don't need a conspiracy to start wondering about cause and effect there. Let's say Moraelin Music Inc publishes 20 albums in one year, and rakes 20 million dollars in sales. Then next year it publishes 19 albums and the sales dip to 19 million dollars. Hmm... Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky?

3. How about the correlation with iTunes and the other online music shops that I've mentioned earlier? Unlike pirating a song, which makes most people feel slightly guilty, this time it's an officially bought song. No reason to go buy the CD too. And it went a long way towards killing the album. While previously the music companies would sell you a whole CD, now you can poach individual tracks, for a tenth of the cost. Do you see how that would cause a loss of $$ in sales? And then there were sites like Allofmp3, which didn't even pay the music companies a cent, but allowed some people to put a "well, then copyright is their problem, not mine, I bought the song" blanket over their conscience anyway.

Or in other words, Dvorak is, as usual, talking out the ass. His job as a tech pundit is to sound all smart, and tell the readers what they want to hear. Or at least some outlandish prediction. It's a short-story writer job, not some real all-knowing oracle. And if you've read some of his other pieces (e.g., the now infamous whine about how the Windows idle process is eating up 99% of his CPU power), he's... a helluval less than all-knowing. In fact, he's an outright idiot.

So be a smart guy and don't base your understanding of the world on his clueless rants. I'm sure you can find better sources of information.

Re:Ah, yes, the douchebag Dvorak

but nowadays "decimated" means something a lot more drastic

Literally, I believe it means to reduce to a tenth part, or by 90%.

No. If you want the "literal" meaning, it's exactly what the romans meant. To reduce by 10%, or in more direct terms: to randomly kill every tenth person. Such as when a new general was to take over some troops that didn't necessarily be fanatically devoted to him, he would start by decimating the troops to make sure they were obedient to him from now on... (and yeah, this worked most of the time, although today the technique is generally frown upon, as it is considered to be of questionable ethical judgement)

The point the grandparent was making was that (a) decimate now means something else, and usually more drastic than it mean to the Romans (b) the music industry isn't decimated in this new sense

AACS-LA should learn...

...that trying to issue a thousands of DMCA take down notices is the fastest way to proliferate something :)

Oh yeah and the fact that DMCA take down notices only apply to servers in the US.

Takedown notice?

Was Digg ever given a takedown notice? I haven't followed this since the original flap over it, but at the time it seemed like Digg cowered at the idea that maybe they could get in legal trouble (or lose an advertiser).

When Digg changed their tune, some users rejoiced that Digg was now going to fight for them, possibly at the cost of the site. Digg even made a solemn pronouncement that they were taking some brave and bold step. But there was never any evidence of any fight. If there was a threat or takedown notice, Digg should have posted that.

Re:Takedown notice?

My understanding is that they were. The issue is that a takedown notice applies only to the posting(s) mentioned and new postings should require additional takedown notices. Digg was proactively removing postings before receieving additional takedown notices which users took to be them "caving" and which resulted in the revolt. At least that's how I understand it.

Re:Takedown notice?

The issue is that a takedown notice applies only to the posting(s) mentioned and new postings should require additional takedown notices.

Did you read the FA? The safe harbor provisions may not apply, since this is not a copyrighted work that is at issue -- the claim is that the number formed part of a circumvention device and that continued hosting of it anywhere on a site makes the hoster liable.

Re:Takedown notice?

I did read the article and I do concede that in the takedown letters they state "Refrain from posting or causing to be provided any AACS circumvention offering or from assisting others in doing so, including by direct links thereto, on any website now or at any time in the future." However, I question how reasonable this is. First, there is the untested (AFAIK) issue if such a short string of numbers is really a circumvention device. We're not talking about code (eg. DeCSS) which actually does something, this is just a string of numbers. If this is ruled to be part of a circumvention device we're in trouble because by that logic the first part of the string '09' would be a part of a circumvention device and prohibiting people from distributing the number 9 would be rather unfortunate. Secondly, I don't think other recipients of takedown notices (eg. Blogspot/Google) are proactively preventing "...any AACS circumvention offering..." from being posted so my assumption would be that they are only acting on sites specifically mentioned in takedown notices and I wonder why Digg should be different. In any event, I was only stating what the reasons for the Digg revolt were; right, wrong or otherwise.

Re:Takedown notice?

This "we're going to go down fighting" was obviously some nonsense invented by Digg's public relations team.

Digg is venture capital funded, its management would be replaced by the end of the day if they seriously intended to risk any amount of equity in the company over some symbolic statement like that.

They'll obviously now just wait for the DMCA notices to take the offending material down, at which point we might expect more grandeur from their PR department if anyone notices.

I dunno

It couldn't have been a DMCA "we own the copyright, now take it down" takedown notice, because those only apply to copyrightable works.

What probably happened was Digg got a letter saying, "You have posted a DRM circumvention tool. If you don't remove it, we will sue your testicles into the stratosphere."

It's different from a takedown notice, but it had the same effect.

Re:Takedown notice?

They received a legally-unenforceable cease and desist letter, but never a DCMA takedown notice. This is key: they were under no legal obligation to do anything at any time. They received a threatening letter and over-reacted. They pulled any stories remotely related to the AACS key, including several that did not mention the number, but only commented on Digg's censorship of it. They also banned the people who submitted those stories -- something that has never been a requirement of the DCMA.

That's what I was protesting. I never expected Digg to do anything illegal or take the issue to court.

Not surprisingly

Dvorak's wrong, at least about one thing. AACS does absolutely nothing to stop us from copying the discs. So called 'copy protection' is the biggest joke of the whole DRM movement. All that AACS accomplishes is making it difficult for people who have legitimately purchased discs from watching them on their linux-powered media centers.

Not a piracy code

Somebody should write the NYTimes a letter and let them know that the code is just the code you need to play the movies you own and paid for. Piracy doesn't figure into it at all.

Re:Not a piracy code

This raises my main argument over DRM.

Why should you have to be a criminal to play your bought media on a different system?

If Mum sends me a WMV encoded clip from her camera of the new puppy, shouldn't I just be able to double click it in Linux, play it and enjoy it without having to feel like a dodgy guy for having not-so-legal Linux codecs installed?

I think, when you create a technology/protocol/service that is a fundamentally useful, standard that is a leading standard, this protocol/format should be open and exchangeable by everyone. /rant

Hell must have frozen over...

Dvorak is making sense.

Insult Dvorak if you want, but he

Makes a damn good keyboard layout though

Re:Insult Dvorak if you want, but he

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm [wikipedia.org]

Re:Insult Dvorak if you want, but he

An English guy is telling a joke in the EU parliament. All the Brits laugh immediately, the French laugh after a short moment as the translator catches up, the Germans laugh as the translator reaches the verb at the end of the sentence, and the slashdotters laugh 15 minutes later when the first +1 Funny comes in.

Blame the Lawyers

In situations like this it is not always correct to blame the lawyers and to give the company that hired the lawyers a free pass on the blame. These companies have in house intellectual property divisions charged with protecting the company's assets. Those corporate minions hire the lawyers and give them a job to do. The lawyers are more than happy to do what they have been asked to do, and generally there is not a whole lot of leeway on the implementation of that job. If the company wants to avoid bad press, then it ought to reconsider its options, legal and otherwise, available to it and change its strategy.

They still don't get it though

The AACS is not a 'copy prevention' or 'copyright protection' code. It has always been possible to copy a DVD and it still is. The AACS is an 'anti fair use' code. As such, it has *nothing* to do with the DMCA.

appalled

I'm appalled that this massive breach of our nation's finest law is being blamed on the good men and women of the legal profession. /sarcasm

Newsflash

It's clear what the people want. So why does the law dictate the opposite?

Everyone's so busy looking at copyright and missing the bigger picture! Our 'democracy' doesn't work.

Blame the Lawyers! No blame Dvorak!

Wait a minute - Dvorak says to blame the lawyers??

Oh my... I am so conflicted..... who do I complain about?

Oh, right - Microsoft!

No Duh it's censorship

This isn't just a matter of one party making a civil threat against another; the government is neck-deep in their involvement. By passing a law as bizarre as DMCA, which the people didn't even ask for, they've outlawed certain types of speech. Argue the merit of censorship, but don't say it's not.

BTW, the NY Times writer is an MPAA-apologist:

..publish and widely distribute a secret code used by the technology and movie industries to prevent piracy of high-definition movies.

(And he makes at least two other references to the crypto being an "anti-piracy" measure.) Anti-piracy is very likely a large part of the motivation for the creation of this system, but as it clearly serves the much more general function of "limiting access." To let things like

1. Preventing many Fair Uses
2. Preventing access to the work even after it has entered Public Domain in the future
3. Controlling the player market(!)

all fall under the umbrella of "preventing piracy" is a pretty distorted way to report the news. If NYT wants to take sides and promote a certain agenda, that's their right, but they should get called on it.

It's not censorship, but the right to censor

Although I agree that the attempt to protect AACS is pernicious, I see the publishing of the key not as an issue of free speech so much as it is one of civil disobedience, the the spirit of Thoreau, who said "any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one."

The reason this is not an issue of free expression is that the number, in itself, is meaningless. It has not intellectual or expressive content. It is merely a secret, and nothing more. Most people advocating the spreading of this number acknowledge the right of private parties to have secrets. They are mortified when sloppy IT practices expose social security numbers.

Does it make a difference why we say the takedown efforts are bad? I think it does. Framing the issue this way claims too much and too little. It claims a right to publish secrets that come into our hands, an idea most of us don't endorse. It claims too little, because the it obscures what is at stake: preventing private industry from taking control of cultural and political discourse using laws designed to encourage expression.

In other words, we must not allow the consortium to confuse the means and ends here. The average person will see clearly enough that the number is merely a secret, and secrets are legally protected as part of our right of privacy. It is the use to which the secret is put that is pernicious to individual freedom. The industry cannot assert it has suffered a loss of privacy with "clean hands". The takedowns are not censorship, they are protecting the means of censorship. The publications are not free expression, they are protecting the means of free expression.

Publishing the number is an act of civil disobedience. Again Thoreau has something important to say here:

Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?

This is marvelously apt to the issue of copy protection. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. The injury that AACS does to individual freedom comes from the power of the state. Furthermore, it prevents the public from experiencing and therefore understanding their rights of free use. Ultimately, it may cripple free political discourse itself, as the machinery of control becomes ubiquitous, and the means for evading control remain illegal.

Dvorak, are you a moron?

The epitome of this has been how the MP3 music-sharing scene -- which was underground and not taken seriously by anyone except a few college kids back in the mid-1990s -- was marketed by lawyers, who waged a holy war against trading at the behest of the Recording Industry Association of America.

This war did nothing but popularize a system of sharing music files, and I can assure you that it went from fringe to mainstream only because of highly publicized legal actions against people who essentially were judgment-proof.

Let me get this straight, Dvorak.

Will you have me believe that the explosion of p2p mp3 sharing had nothing to do with a) the proliferation of broadband, and b) free music? That if the RIAA hadn't gone on a massive lawsuit campaign, no one would want free music?

Well, I think that you are full of it.

Lawyers do what they are paid to do.

Just like any other professionals.
Although I hate them as much as the next guy, they did not cause this mess.
This mess is caused by out-dated business models, corrupt legislation, impunity and progress, amongst other factors that have historically caused civil disobedience.
To blame the lawyers is not only a cliché, it is confusing the issue.
Lawyer language can be aggressive, but when you bring in lawyers it means you have already tried nicely.

Re:Lawyers do what they are paid to do.

Although I hate them as much as the next guy, they did not cause this mess. This mess is caused by out-dated business models, corrupt legislation, impunity and progress, amongst other factors that have historically caused civil disobedience. To blame the lawyers is not only a cliché, it is confusing the issue. Lawyer language can be aggressive, but when you bring in lawyers it means you have already tried nicely.

The porblem isn't that the lawyers didn't do what they were told, nor even that they did do what they were told. Lawyers have a responsibility to their clients not only to take legal action when required, but also to advise their clients on the likely outcomes of their actions, as well as the likelihood of success. Any halfway honest lawyer should have told their client "You will pay us thousands of hours, You will not acheive your goal, and this will backfire causing yet another in a bad series of negative press about your company". The implication here is that the lawyers did not do this. Given the above statement, I find it hard to beleive that an executive at XYZ company would pursue this approach when a legal professional told them to call it a day and move on.
The lawyers should have known this would happen. Posting a song for others to download requires speical software (e.g. napster, kazaa, bittorrent, etc...), and people still manage to do it on a *massive* scale. Posting a 32 digit number is so easy, any 12 year old kid can post it in thousands of places in the space of a day or so. The lawyers all have plenty of precedent to say that takedown notices are more likely to backfire than to succeed, ergo it is their responsibility to advise their clients against this kind of behavior.

-=Geoskd

Huh?

and documents instances of the infamous key appearing in purely expressive form.

Like in poetry? A haiku? What?

Re:Huh?

09 F9 11 02 9D
74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5
63 56 88 C0 rain

So, where are all these digg posts?

I just looked back over the past few days on digg.com, and could find no evidence of this HD-DVD keyposting. Have digg said 'we won't censor any more posts', and then censored all the posts, or what?

Bad Journalism at NYTimes

Check out this quote:

> Some people believe that such systems unfairly limit their freedom to listen to music and watch movies on whatever devices they choose.

What the is that? Could they maybe cite one of many sources who will freely give that opinion? Fox pioneered this terrible technique of interjecting their own opinion via the construct "Some say...", and it's terrible journalism. I imagine this article was written off the cuff, but just give the EFF or anyone else a buzz for a quick quote.

Dvorak doesn't get it

But if ruining a client's image and reputation, and often turning it into a laughingstock is done in the name of "protecting," then perhaps the legal profession should reconsider whether it's being counterproductive.

The legal profession has thought about it, John -- long and hard. And the conclusion is that lawyers are servants, not masters. That's the way it is, and that's the way it must be. If the master wants to jump off a cliff, the servant has no right whatsoever to interfere, because it's not his call to make. He'll tell you not to jump, beg with you, plead, but at the end of the day all he can do is follow your orders, send out cease-and-desist letters, and watch as the PR disaster sends you plummeting to the rocks below.

WTF?

How in the world is it censorship to try an maintain private information? This community is hypocritical.

It makes perfect sense.

There's nothing hypocritical about this.

This is about a secret number. This number is, well, a number. You can't own a number. No number is a secret unto itself. That they use it as the key for their cryptography, that's the secret they want to keep private. Unfortunately for them, the number was available to anyone with a disk, a drive, and the right software. Someone was bound to tell. They tried to un-share the secret by squelching the mention of the number, not the association with their cryptography. That's censorship.

It's a popular topic here for a number of reasons, including:

• "Wishing it away" will not erase the fact that true DRM is not possible -- a fact that is abundantly obvious to everyone except the *IAA. Even the geeks who are milking them with tales of bulletproof DRM and golden keys understand this and insist on being paid cash up front.
• It's an opporunity to bash lawyers - the only professionals that produce nothing, create nothing, serve noone, and gets a third of everything they touch. For the most part even lawyers despise lawyers.
• Laughing at the failures of incompetent executives is a popular sport around here. We laugh because we dare not cry. Read Dilbert and in time you'll come to understand.

There's a bunch more reasons, but you get the idea.

Frankly I think this whole protect-the-media-empire-profits mode the government has gotten into lately is treason against the people and the Republic. It's an example of legislation for hire. It's an erosion of civil rights to protect the unearned profits on Steamboat Willie. It is vile. But that's just my opinion.

One thing Dvorak got wrong ...

Investors should be aware of the overall dangers the legal profession present to companies, and how its current and generalized naiveté can sink fortunes overnight. While I know of no corporation that has been bankrupted by this sort of fiasco, it will happen eventually if lawyers doesn't catch up with the times.

SCO? [groklaw.net]

13256278887989457651018865901401704640 mine still

13256278887989457651018865901401704640 is mine mine mine it's like an 718624318471594843*2^64 + 15582831591453788352 which is also mine.

Those sequences of 8887 are especially nice and to finish on 640, well WHO needs more than that.

I give you permission to use it under the terms of the GPLv3 or a separate license where you agree to pay me 95% of all revenue.

Tempest in a teapot

All the threats are tempest in a teapot. The AACS-LA claims that the key is a component of a copy protection circumvention mechanism. The problem with that theory, is that by the time the key was published widely, it was already revoked. As the key was no longer valid, it really can't be said to be part of a circumvention system. Which just makes all the threatening letters all that much more brainless. Dvorak didn't know just how right he was.

Uh... lawyers didn't cause this? WHAT?

I love the comments that the lawyers didn't cause this - the law did.

WHO DO YOU THINK WRITES THE LAWS?

Look at the prior professions of your congressmen and women.

  -l

Component of a circumvention tool??

I thought the key was a component of the encryption tool. Which sort of makes it a component of the decryption tool. Being used by numerous appliances that can actually play this sort of content...

I use the letter "A" as encryption key for my specially made barf-cough-hack CD, so now I'm sueing pretty much everyone because they're using the letter "A" in publications about my CD.

Hmm. Yups! Profit!

Because the lawyers flooded the site?

Seriously, come on Dvorak, get you're head out of your ass. Are you next going to tell me the cops created the LA riots? The lawyers were trying to litigate, it's what they were going to do. Nothing to surprising. Anything about the MPAA or RIAA is always going to get little rebel johnny's panties in a twist because he wants to be different and fight the establishment... with everyone else. It doesn't matter if the lawyers litigated or not.

The blame for the Digg revolt lands on two groups. The users and the site admins, they were the direct cause for it. If the admins didn't start censoring the numbers posts the users wouldn't have tried to be so clever to post it again. If they had adequate screening tools they might have at least stemmed some of the flood. The lawyers might not have told Digg to censor it and they could have banned it for another reason and the revolt would have happened along another line.

On the other hands the only people actually involved in the revolt are the users. You can go blame anyone else but the users were the ones posting the number. Just because someone else buys a guy, and another person loads it but puts the safety on, if a third person takes that gun turns off the safety and shoots someone, it's the fault of the third person, not the first two people. This country has a complex of "who's fault is it" and we seem to always ignore the person who did the crime/action.

What say you?

The NYTimes has taken notice and written quite a decent article that actually acknowledges that the take-down notices amount to censorship and documents instances of the infamous key appearing in purely expressive form.


Well, everyone knows that the NYT is nothing but Far Left Loonies.
They hate the USA & hence they publish such stuff.
What say you?
- Bill'O'R

Wikipedia are bloody hypocrites

I could understand the decision to remove the decryption key from articles that were irrelevant to the subject of HD-DVD encrytion itself; even if it were an act of insurrection. However preventing the creation of an article about the encryption key, including censoring any discussion of it in their Talk forums smacks of blatant hypocrisy, keeping in mind that they have articles that are much more explicit.

For instance, the Wikipedia article on DeCSS [wikipedia.org] itself has actual SOURCE CODE to DeCSS, links to DeCSS code galleries and technical discussions of DeCSS.

Dvorak hit the nail squarely on the head...

at the end of his article where he said:

Or perhaps some executives should think for themselves.

Techinically, the EFF just opened themselves up

What about just linking to a place where the key is posted? The courts in the DeCSS case wrestled with the proper test to apply when someone links to a location where a circumvention tool can be found. Ultimately, the district court held that an injunction against linking could be issued after a final judgment if a the plaintiff could show, by clear and convincing evidence,

"that those responsible for the link (a) know at the relevant time that the offending material is on the linked-to site, (b) know that it is circumvention technology that may not lawfully be offered, and (c) create or maintain the link for the purpose of disseminating that technology."

and then earlier in the article, which has a link to Google, they state,

the futile mission of trying to get every instance of at least one key (hint: it begins with 09 f9) removed from the Internet

They just created a link to a site that provide the means, and knew the link would have the information to crack, and they know it's illegal to crack...so all 3 criteria set are met for infringement under DMCA.

I really hate this DMCA. I think it's the stupidest law since prohibition.

Re:Digg is the most childish site ever..

I think it is on slashdot because the whole Digg revolt is actually showing a new socio-political form of protest, bringing civil disobedience into the virtual world. Before you would have to show up to a rally, carry a big sign, shout and chant stuff and then get beat up by police with nightsticks, peppersprayed, shot with rubber bullets, tear gassed, ect... but who has the time or energy for that these days.

Sit at home, find a piece of info that some company does not want the world to know and post it onto a site like Digg, Slashdot or some other popular site and kick back and watch the fireworks. The reason it is/was so successful was because of the response it got from AACS-LA, they issued hundreds or thousands of DMCA take-down notices. If it looked like they did not give a crap then odds are high that nothing would have happened.

This is 100% the result of a big bad corporation deciding to try and stomp on the rights of the consumers and citizens and in this case instead of laying down and taking their beating like a good citizen is supposed to they stood up and gave AACS-LA a kick in the balls. Trying to censor something is the quickest way to make sure everyone knows about it.

Plus sometimes it takes a childish tantrum to get people to take a look at a real problem (DMCA)

Re:Digg is the most childish site ever..

The more they push, the harder we push back.

That summarizes it pretty well too.

They pushed very hard with the thousands of DCMA take downs and we pushed back, taking out a popular site in the process.

Re:Digg is the most childish site ever..

Maybe h*s keyboard *s broke.

Re:Digg is the most childish site ever..

Trying to censor something is the quickest way to make sure everyone knows about it.

Exactly. Big corporations that want to censor some piece of information should really read up on the Streisand Effect [wikipedia.org].

Re:People just don't understand free speech.

There are lots of people with opinions that they believe are absolutely correct, no two ways about it. That doesn't make it necessarily so.

Why do they say they have liberty?

They say this because they have been reciting the Pledge of Allegience since birth. Theless generous might call this brainwashing.

It is clearly a hyporcracy since, for instance blacks were hardly receiving the "liberty and justice for all" until very recently and many people do not at present. Say it enough and you don't doubt it. That those liberties and justice don't exist hardly matters - people still believe they have them.

Sure, USA is better than China etc, but to be the world leader in freedom that USA claims to be it should be ranking a bit higher than 15/11 on http://www.worldaudit.org/press.htm [worldaudit.org]

Re:People just don't understand free speech.

Of course there are gray areas in "freedom of speech". For example, the United States has often equated giving money to a candidate as "speech". I personally disagree that the right to give arbitrary money to a candidate is equal to the right of free expression or even association, but it's certainly debatable. There's also the question of intent-- you may be free to say anything and not be locked up for the speech, but be locked up because the speech implied intent or guilt in another matter entirely. Depending on how silly and "thought-crime"esque other laws are, it may seem like it's speech itself that is being impinged.

Anyway, nothing is black and white, and especially not something as rich as speech.

In any case, in case this article leads anyone to any undue optimism, you can go read ABC news' editorial on the matter [go.com] to bring you back down again (or to make your blood boil, depending on your temperament).

Re:People just don't understand free speech.

> That includes being able to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. If you're not allowed to do that, then you do not truly have freedom of speech.

What if the theater REALLY is on fire?!

That example is NOT about freedom of speech, but about property rights.

i.e.
http://blog.mises.org/archives/003070.asp [mises.org]

Re:People just don't understand free speech.

That includes being able to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theater.

Maybe theres a distinction to be made between 'freedom of speech' and 'freedom of yelling'?

Re:People just don't understand free speech.

>That includes being able to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. If you're not allowed to do that, then you do not truly have
>freedom of speech.

If the theatre happens to be on fire, then you will probably have the gratitude of the people within.

If the theatre happens to NOT be on fire, you may face consequences at the hands of those same people.

In no case was "yelling fire" illegal. However, intentionally causing a panic and creating a public nuisance, *is* illegal.

On the other hand, the allusion to yelling fire was meant to illustrate the basis for a doctrine that a compelling state interest existed that could justify the suppression of certain activities that would otherwise be protected by the First Amendment. In particular, "yelling fire" was an example used in a case that ruled it illegal to distribute flyers opposing the military draft during WWI. I think it is also important to understand that this ruling was overturned, which probably means it *is* legal to protest against a draft during wartime.

If you experiment with "yelling fire", you will probably find that no law actively suppresses your right to do it, and you will also almost certainly find that no law protects you from the ass kicking you receive as a result -- or from the harsh manner in which you are removed from the theatre by its proprietor or the police.

Oliver Wendell Holmes was helping to establish what rights were, and to what extent the expression of one's rights were allowed to abridge the rights of others.

Today, the test for whether first amendment protections my be abridged on any activity, is if the state can argue that it is intended to, and will likely incite "imminent lawless action", a stricter standard than the "clear and present danger" which had existed before 1969. Essentially the government may "place time, place and manner" restrictions on First Amendment activities, if it can argue that the activities are likely to cause a riot.

For what it's worth, I do believe the Federal Government has clearly failed to adhere to this standard on numerous occasions.

Re:Digg is the most childish site ever..

Why even mention it on slashdot? To make a bunch of 14 year olds happy?

Those 14 year olds are very big deal for entire media/entertainment industry. It is their majority of customer base, especially box office stuff. You wouldn't want them to boycott your products or hate them. You wouldn't threaten them either unless you are insane.

Are those lawyers still working? It won't last too long.