rodzik@www

The careful balance that must be maintained between the law and the rights of citizens has always been an issue in the United States. At times the balance has gone one way or another, and while for the most part it has remained mostly balanced, at times everything goes haywire. A good example of this is prohibition. The United States attempted to outright ban the sale, manufacture, or transportation of alcohol. Some of the results of prohibition included the spread of gangs, racketeering, organized crime, and widespread civil disobedience.

In 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was signed into law in the United States. This law shifted the balance in the technological world in strong favor of the copyright holders of media and restricted many of the rights of the consumers of media. For the last nine years there has been a steady stream of first amendment infringements resulting from unnecessarily broad rights granted to copyright holders and stripped from legitimate consumers to the point that a website, Chilling Effects was established to inform people of their rights (and the rights they lost under the DMCA) and to track the effects of the law.

This past Monday and Tuesday the pot boiled over. The popular community-driven website Digg had a record-breaking story posted to it regarding the decryption key for HD DVD movies (in order to try to prevent unauthorized distribution of HD DVDs, all content is encrypted and to play the content the decryption key is needed). Legal threats were sent and Digg bowed to the pressure. But the pieces had already been put into motion that would trigger one of the biggest and most widespread acts of unrest in the internet's history. Thousands of stories flooded Digg until they finally gave up and accepted the legal fight they may have. Hundreds of thousands of websites posted the key (over 500,000 google results as of publication), it was turned into a picture, a song, placed on t-shirts and other clothing, and parodied. Wikipedia has been trying to control things for two days, and the administrators are essentially in chaos.

The whole controversy (summary of events that I've been heavily involved with) essentially comes down to a consumer revolt over censorship in the digital age. The DMCA has been restricting first amendment rights that shouldn't be granted to copyright holders (yes, some of the ideas of the DMCA are valid, but their implementation was astronomically horrible) and after nine years the perfect storm of events came together. The public delivered a resounding rally, now it's up to our representatives in Congress to respond in kind.

Update (5/8/2007) - I now own the number "42 36 5B 60 9C 58 7F 20 51 E7 4F 69 54 F4 3E D7." Any attempt to distribute this number is a violation of the law under the DMCA, as it is an illegal circumvention device.