Interesting Stuff

It seems that users of Digg posted the AACS key (the DRM used in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray) recently. In response to fears of DMCA-based lawsuits, the Digg executives attempted to remove the key from their site. However, so many Diggers fought back by reposting the key that Digg now stands with them and will no longer attempt to remove it. As Digg founder Kevin Rose wrote,

[Y]ou’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.

Hurrah! This, coupled with Steve Jobs’ take on DRM (which caused Apple to sell DRM-free music on iTunes), makes it look like industries are thankfully turning against DRM. The whole idea of DRM is laughably otiose; I’m still surprised anyone thought it would work in the first place. “Gee, let’s take data we want users to have, encrypt it, give the users a way to decrypt it, and hope that they don’t watch our decryption process when they run it.” Even without considering the analog hole, this isn’t going to work. If you give someone data in a format that they can use, by definition they will be able to use this data for their own purposes; there’s no way around it.