AACS’s response to the publicity that they generated

You surely now what has happened during the last week. The AACS send some cease and desist letters to bloggers and website owners requesting the takedown of the so called HD-DVD processing key. The story more or less exploded on the web. The main reason for this was probably the way the admins of digg.com handled the affair. Their first decided to pull all articles posted to digg containing the key which lead to a furious reaction of the digg community who submitted so many articles about the key to digg that the founder of digg decided to follow the lead of his community and let it happen.

In the meanwhile many news sites, radio stations and even tv networks published stories about what was happening on the Internet distributing the key exponentially on the Internet. If you search for the code today you find that more than 1.3 million websites reference it. The AACS nevertheless decided to take on the fight which leads to question that I would like to ask “Have not they learned a thing from last weeks events ?”

Even if it would be technically possible to send Cease and Desist letters to all 1.3 million websites they would not have eliminated the key from the eye of the public. They probably can force American websites to take down the key but what about sites that do not care about American laws ? China, Russia or even Sweden for instance. Those sites most likely won’t react at all to letters that they receive.

If they are really going to send those letters out it will generate even more hype which leads to even more sites posting that key. The funny thing here is that not many users even know what they could do with that key. How is this key helping them defeat the copy protection of HD-DVD / Blue-Ray movies ?

The commercial pirates already know the key and produce copies using it but what about you and me ? Do we profit from that key in any way ? I don’t think so. At least not at the moment. The casual user will not be able to use the key until someone does write a good program that does everything automatically.

The actions of the AACS remind me of someone running with his head against a wall and instead of learning from this painful incident they decide to do it again because they still believe this was the only way to get past it.