Remember what I said yesterday about content owners making it harder for people like me to circumvent copy protections and DRM in order to legally copy something for fair use purposes? Okay maybe you didn’t get that far. For those who don’t know, the new blu-ray and hd-dvd’s have stronger copy protection. The minute they came out, however, hackers cracked the protection scheme and have posted instructions all over the internet. A couple of weeks ago, Google received a takedown notice for the key that allows someone to copy hd-dvds. The key itself is contained in the takedown notice so now the whole internet has this key. This morning as I was perusing my feeds, which include a collection of technorati tags such as “dmca” and “copyright,” I noticed this key is everywhere. A search on technorati reveals probably hundreds of blogs posting this key. Can they issue takedown notices for all of them? Is it really worth it? Maybe they should give up? I find the whole thing amusing.
Update: There’s now a t-shirt.