ETC@BMC

Laura Blankenship May 3rd, 2007

The story I’m about to discuss may not seem like it’s relevant to education, but it is, extraordinarily so. But it wouldn’t seem like it to the average person. For the last few days, I’ve been watching the Internet buzz with excitement as a 32 digit number was published on a wide variety of blogs and forums. The excitement was fueled by the purpose of this number. It’s a code that coupled with the ride software can decrypt the new hd dvd format. I first saw mention of the number on Monday. On Tuesday morning, when I opened my news reader, which automatically collects news related to copyright and the dmca among other topics, the number was everywhere! The number had been revealed months ago in various forums, but the increased interest was spawned by the AACS-LA’s own takedown notice to Google that had posted the number which contained the number itself in the url. People thought that was funny and so started posting about it and posting the number more widely. The site that was serving as a conduit for many of these postings, Digg.com, received as many 15,000 “diggs” for sites containing the number until they themselves received a request to prevent the sites from showing up on their site. (Digg is simply a site that recommends other sites through a user recommendation system; it’s very popular.) At first, the Digg administrators tried to take down all references to sites containing the number, but they couldn’t keep up with the posts. Eventually, an angry internet mob basically shut the site down, and digg eventually capitulated and allowed the sites to stand, not just giving up, but actually siding with their users and opening themselves up for a lawsuit. The whole story made it to the mainstream news this morning.

There are two reasons I find this story interesting for educators. First, it’s a story about Web 2.0 on a couple of levels. For me, following the story and trying to find out historical information about the code, I had to rely on Web 2.0 sources–blogs, forums, and the like. This is not a story that usually shows up in the mainstream media. By digging around–using Google and Technorati, I was able to find ample information on all sides of the issue. The only semi-mainstream source I could find was a Wired magazine blog. One of the most informative sites I found in my search was Ed Felten’s blog. Ed Felten is no random blogger, but a computer science professor at Princeton who specialized in security issues. His was a name I’d heard and so I knew the information on his blog would be credible. Finding the information was a lesson in the power of Web 2.0 sources, but also in vetting those sources. A good deal of what I found was just regular people ranting about the movie industry and such, a useful indicator of the general cultural moment, but not informative.

The other Web 2.0 story had to do with the users of Digg getting their way. Not everyone saw this as a democratic success story. And it’s not the first time users on the web have had a tangible effect on an issue.

The second reason the story is interesting is because of the decryption issue itself. Posting the code is illegal as it violates the part of the DMCA that prohibits making public circumvention tools. The EFF explains the legal issues clearly in this statement. Unlike CDs, which can be easily ripped and imported into music players, DVDs have long been encoded and encrypted in a way that makes it impossible for people to simply pop the DVD into their computers and make a copy of it. The current DVD format’s code was cracked back in 2000 with similar results to the current hacking incident (we have the t-shirt as proof). From a very strict interpretation of the DMCA, the way that most professors were obtaining film clips was technically illegal since it involved circumventing the copy protection on the DVDs (and VHS tapes) from which the clips were taken. Earlier this year, however, the copyright office made an exception for film studies professors, making it legal for them to circumvent protections in order to make clips as long as they followed fair use guidelines. Still, strictly speaking, anyone outside of the film studies discipline is still breaking the law if they circumvent these protections.

Why should we care about this code and this incident? Well, if you’re a professor and you need a film clip for teaching or research purposes that comes from an hd-dvd, you might need that code just to get the clip, just to do your job. As formats change, the copy protection changes, which increases the chance that the current equipment we have may not have the ability to make the clips we need. There’s a lot of pressure on computer manufacturers, software manufacturers, and video equipment makers to make sure their products will protect the content being played on them or through them from being copied. If we, as educators, don’t remind lawmakers that we’re legally allowed to work with this material for educational purposes, the market may eventually evolve in a way where it’s actually impossible for us to do so. And then, we may be cruising around on the darknet to find these codes and the technical means to break copyright, behaving like criminals in order to uphold our rights.

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