Oh nine eff nine

Sat 5 May 07 14:35 | Tags: DRM

Okay, well, assuming that this isn't the only tech blog on the internet you've read, you already know at least part of the story here. But did you know that the code itself is not a recent development; it's been known about since February? What's interesting is that nobody really cared until recently…

Let's back up a bit. Most HD-DVD discs are encrypted, and any hardware or software device to play the discs must first decrypt the content in order to play the video. The same is true for standard DVD discs. A certain key is needed in order to "unlock" and decrypt the video for playback. If you wanted to make software or hardware to play HD-DVDs, you had to go through AACS LA, the licensing agency that developed and licenses HD-DVD's encryption scheme, and get them to give you a revokable key to use in your product. (This is a bit of a simplification.) This makes it difficult for groups and people without money or influence to make their own HD-DVD-using projects, since anything they want to build has to pass through a regulatory group first. Want to build a program to allow users to rip HD-DVDs to their hard drive and re-encode them as videos for the iPod, like Handbrake? Or perhaps add HD-DVD playback to an open-source video playback program like VLC? Not with the AACS LA's approval, you're not.

Is it really that easy?

Soon after HD-DVD drives and discs first started hitting the market, people started trying to figure out how to circumvent the encryption scheme. Doing so would allow them to do things with their discs that wouldn't be approved by the AACS LA or the movie industry, but wouldn't necessarily be against spirit (if not the letter) of the law, such as re-encoding and the open-source playback programs mentioned above. In February, the now-infamous 32-digit hexadecimal number which begins with "09f9" was discovered. It seems to be a sort of "master key" for the decryption of HD-DVD content, which possibly cannot be revoked by the AACS LA (if it is possible, it hasn't happened yet). So if the code came out back in February, how come you probably haven't heard about it until now?

That's where things start to get interesting. In mid-April, the AACS LA began siccing their lawyers on web sites which had published the "09f9" code, claiming that publication of the code violated their copyright on the HD-DVD encryption scheme. Eventually, they went after the social news site Digg, ordering them to remove any stories which contained or linked to the code. Starting on the first of May, Digg complied and began deleting these stories, and in some cases banning the members that had posted them. When Digg users began to notice the pattern, they "revolted" and began posting new stories containing or linking to the code by the thousands, and voting for them so that they appeared on the front page of the site; whereas it typically takes around a hundred votes for a Digg submission to hit the front page, any submission mentioning 09f9 was receiving over three thousand. Digg's content moderators were flooded, unable to delete new 09f9 stories faster than they were being posted. Digg being one of the English-speaking internet's most popular web sites, the story of this "rebellion" was covered by both online and traditional news sources, and the whole thing just kind of blew up from there; 09f9 became a song, a t-shirt, an adolescent daydream. Eventually, Digg co-founder Kevin Rose (who himself has ranted against draconian copy-protection schemes on his Diggnation podcast) stepped in and posted a message on his blog which contained the infamous code stating that Digg would no longer fight the code; "effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the [legal] consequences might be."

The outcome of all this, though, and what really makes it interesting, is that the Digg "revolt" and the subsequent news coverage is all a direct result of the AACS LA's attempts to silence web sites that were spreading the code. In other words, by actively trying to stop the code from being spread, the code has now spread everywhere. What was previously an obscure number only really of interest to a very limited number of programmers and video geeks has become a rallying cry against censorship and artificial usefulness limits imposed on products by big business. And the funny thing is that this is the second time something like this has happened on the internet! As I said earlier in this article, DVDs have content encryption schemes just like HD-DVDs do; however in 1999, that encryption scheme was circumvented, thus leading to the current plethora of open-source software projects that can decrypt, play, rip and convert DVDs. And just like today, the movie industry called on their suits in an attempt to stop information on the circumvention from spreading on the internet. The backlash led to the decryption code being printed on T-shirts and made a hero out of one of its developers, who has come to be known as DVD Jon, after he was tried and eventually acquitted for his involvement in the project in Norway's court system. Just as with DVD Jon's hack back then, 09f9 would be nowhere near as widely known as it is today if the film industry hadn't tried to stop it from becoming widely known. Those who do not learn from history, etc, etc.

Now, just for fun, let's look at some domain names which have resulted from the popularization of the code.

Did I miss any? Are any of the ones which were showing something boring at the time I wrote this now showing something interesting? Let me know, and I'll update this list accordingly.

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