AACS Plays Whack-a-Mole with Extracted Key

The people who control AACS, the copy protection technology used on HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs, are apparently trying to shut down websites that publish a certain 128-bit integer. The number is apparently a “processing key” used in AACS. Together with a suitable computer program, the key allows the decryption of video content on most existing HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs.
I won’t publish the key here but you can spot it all over the Web. It’s a long string starting with “09 F9″.
The key has been published on a few websites for months, but in recent days the AACS “Licensing Authority” (AACS LA) has taken to sending out demand letters to websites that publish the key, claiming that the key is a circumvention technology under the DMCA. News of these demand letters, and the subsequent disappearance of content and whole sites from the Net, has triggered an entirely predictable backlash, with thousands of people reposting the key to their own sites.
The key will inevitably remain available, and AACSLA are just making themselves look silly by trying to suppress it. We’ve seen this script before. The key will show up on T-shirts and in song lyrics. It will be chalked on the sidewalk outside the AACS LA office. And so on.
It’s hard to see the logic in AACS LA’s strategy here. Their end goal is (or should be) to stop unauthorized online distribution of high-def video files ripped from HD-DVD or Blu-ray discs. The files in question are enormous and cumbersome to store and distribute, containing more than a gigabyte of content. If you can’t stop distribution of these huge files, surely there’s no hope of stopping distribution of a little sixteen-byte key, or even of decryption software containing [...]

Read more at Ed Felten

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