Well, this is fun. There has been a firestorm of controversy over the net in the last week. It looks like Digg, a popular website, has been the recipient of one of the cease-and-desist letters related to articles that mention a key capable of cracking the Advanced Acess Control System of Blu-ray and HD-DVD movie media. These letters come from the MPAA and the Advanced Access Content System consortium, which is responsible for protecting HD DVD and Blu-Ray discs from illegal copying. Once this letter spread over the web, it was like a slap in the face for hackers and they spread hundreds of comments and postings related to free speech issues, causing Digg to reconsider their deletion of key related postings.
"After seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you have made it clear. You would rather see Digg go down fighting than bow to a bigger company," wrote Rose.
"We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying." said Keven Rose, Digg's founder.
The head of AACP, Michael Ayers, said his group respects free speech but these key postings were “outside of the realm of protected free speech”. AACS has already revoked the posted key and players will have to download a new key in order to get their hardware to work. This system was designed into AACS copy protection because the keys were expected to be broken, just not as fast as this.
