Like many geeks, I’ve been watching the progress of what BoingBoing is calling “the AACS Debacle” with interest over the last couple days.

For those of you not familiar with it, here’s the executive summary: some guy, apparently irritated that he wasn’t allowed to play the next-generation Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs on his Linux machine, dug around and discovered an easy way to break the copy protection scheme on them — the one that companies spent years and many millions of dollars to painstakingly work out. It all boiled down to a sixteen-byte hexadecimal number, which he posted. This week, the company that controls the copy-protection technology decided to get heavy-handed about it and force everyone to remove it from the Internet using the legal blunt weapon of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the DMCA), sparking a user revolt on the popular site Digg.

I have never yet seen a case where such an attempt actually worked — and there have been many of them, large and small, in the past decade — but hope springs eternal, I guess. Once a piece of information escapes onto the ‘net, there’s as much chance of suppressing it as there is of stuffing the magic blue smoke back into a CPU. Every later AACS story on BoingBoing tracked the number of web pages that mentioned the number… it started at less than 36,000 and has ballooned over the last couple days to it’s current value of over 802,000 pages.

Here’s a little note for the AACS, since they don’t seem to get it: if you tell your average geek [1] that he’s not allowed to do or know something that he thinks he should be able to, he’s going to find a way to do it anyway. Especially if you come down on him like a load of bricks, and most especially if you invoke the hated DMCA law, which to him just smacks of evil corporations squeezing money out of people by keeping them ignorant and intimidated. Geeks are free-thinking people, in every sense of the phrase, and most of them believe that any knowledge that a person is willing to share should be available to everyone. They also have the technical skills to learn just about anything they want to, and they mock your pitiful technical attempts to prevent them from exercising their fair-use rights.

I have to salute Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg. Caught between the rock of legal threats on one side and the hard place of a user revolt on the other, he stood up for his users. I can only hope that he and his company survive the aftermath.

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Notes

[1] That’s specifically computer geeks, not just any old geek.