I gave a presentation to the local tech meetup here in Bend yesterday, about Open Source Culture and how it’s impacting businesses beyond the software industry. Truth be told, it was less a presentation and more just a series of slides around which the group could have a conversation. But it was fun, and hopefully everyone took something away from it. I’ve posted the slides here, if anyone is interested: http://businessnetwork.meetup.com/53/files/
One of the more interesting (I think) non-topics that we didn’t get around to is the controversy brewing around the recent Digg.com/HD-DVD issue. I sent around a 30 second summary to the meetup mailing list, but it seemed interesting enough that I thought I’d post it here. It goes something like this:
- A consortium of entertainment industry companies creates the “AACS” copy-protection algorithm to keep people from copying HD-DVDs
- Someone cracks the AACS algorithm and posts the key on the web.
- News of the crack quickly hits the front page of mainstream user-powered-news site, Digg.com
- The AACS consortium takes notice and issues a DMCA takedown notice to Digg, claiming they hold the copyright to the key (a simple 16-byte number).
- Digg removes the article.
- Digg users take notice and “revolt”, by posting the AACS key on articles throughout the digg.com site, essentially forcing Digg to censor every page on their site.
- After 24 hours of having to suspend accounts and delete articles, Digg eventually capitulates to
user demand and decides to just see what happens if they ignore the takedown notice.
It’s yet to be seen how this will play out. The AACS is making rumblings about a legal battle though. Which could prove very interesting, with issues like, “Can you copyright a number?”, and “At what point does copyrighted material become de-facto public domain?”
BTW, if you want the key, it’s now posted on over
~1,700,000 web pages. 🙂