You may have heard by now that the encryption key to HD media (HD DVD and Bluray) has been found and posted online. I’ve thought about trying to explain what this key is, but every effort I make ends up making our society sound completely ridiculous. For future anthropologists out there who are uncovering the history about our world through my blog, somewhere in the late 20th century, early 21st century, someone thought it’d be a good idea to sell people discs containing movies and/or music, but to then restrict access to that media via what they call DRM, or digital rights management. Already, this is a futile effort because most people are able to just download a non-DRM restricted version of the media for free off of the internet. Since DRM tends to reduce the value of the media it’s applied upon in the eyes of the consumer, the pirated stuff downloaded for free off of the internet has a higher value than the commercial stuff purchased from stores, even if every consumer had infinite money and thus price was not a factor in evaluating these two alternatives.

Further emphasizing the stupidity of DRM is that the way it is currently implemented is to encrypt the content of the media on the disc, and to then include the decryption key in the player (which is either a software player or a hardware player). Anyone who’s done even the most elementary study of cryptography should be able to tell that this won’t work (my qualifications are nothing more than having sat in on 2 lectures of 1 hour each at a university course in cryptography). It’s believed that the idea was to use laws or political pressure to prevent the key from slipping out into the general public. Obviously, this has failed.

When the key leaked out, the key-owners sent out DMCA takedown notices, which is understandable as a panicked knee-jerk reaction. Predictably, the response of the Internet users at large was to revolt and further spread awareness of the keys. T-shirts were made with the key printed on them; the key was made into signatures for bulletin board posts; Someone registered the key as a domain name; people got the key tattooed onto their bodies; people wrote songs and poems about the key, and so on. At this point, you’d figure the owner of the key would get the message, and back down with the lawsuits. Not so.

In light of the reaction, some are calling on the AACS to take a more moderate tone and not fan the flames of more postings by trying to stamp them out. Ayers said the AACS will not comment on its next moves, such as whether it will ask Google to take down the YouTube postings.

"If the local neighborhood gang is throwing rocks at your house, some people might tell you not to call the police because they will just throw bigger rocks," said Ayers.

EETimes

A more apt analogy would be if you had a secret that you didn’t want to get out (e.g. that your mom still dresses you in the morning), and you tried to stop people from spreading that secret by calling the police and telling them “Hey, please make these people stop having the information that my mom dresses me in the morning.” Not only is this request impossible to satisfy, the act of making that request in itself will help spread the secret.