All Your Anti-Piracy Code Are Belong To Us!
This week, in a brilliant display of Internet solidarity, the copy protection source code for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs was widely disseminated online. The reason? A lawyer asked them not to. (Read the story here.)This is the reason you need to tread VERY CAREFULLY when dealing with people online. After all, the way this story turned out wasn’t the end game for these people. That the studio threatened them in a way that would normally have worked off line, in the real world, is what set them off.
On line, individuals can have much more power than a company or its legal department. As such, this can happen not just when issuing a cease and desist, but when pitching an inappropriate story to another blog, or spamming the comment field on someone’s blog or forum. The Internet is a level playing field, the hierarchy of “strong” and “weak” based on a user’s knowledge of networking systems, HTML and their own daring.
This case is a prime example of this, and the studio that sent out these threatening letters in the first place has lost the battle because of it. No matter how many lawyers or cops or legal documents this movie studio assembles, they cannot prevent these 32 bits of code from becoming the most famous secret on the internet without the use of a time machine.
