HD DVD lawsuit threats explode in MPAA’s face
Oh, how delicious. Someone’s registered a nice domain name too.
If you’re wondering what the hell I’m talking about, its basically this: A working encryption key (a simple 16 pairs of hex digits) for the HD DVD format was leaked. The MPAA started throwing its weight around threatening lawsuits on anyone who mentioned the-number-of-doom. Digg caved in and deleted the posts. Digg users revolted and kept reposting and digging the shit out of the story. Kevin Rose of Digg then decided to let the HD DVD key stories run. Over 8000 diggs so far.
Read what they say about it here and here.
Congratulations MPAA, your lawyer-heavy tactics have brought far more publicity to this than it ever would have gotten by itself!
Update: 26,941 diggs as of 18:18 May 02 2007 
Michael Flanagan on May 2nd, 2007
Brilliant.
Up until yesterday I had basically no idea that this ‘magic-number’ existed, what it was for, or why I should care. Today I could almost recite it from memory I’ve seen it so much.
I
09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0 at return to pearse on May 2nd, 2007
[...] (via) Tags: return to pearse, returntopearse, hd, dvd, bluray, mpaa, digg, law, lawyers, dmca [...]
neil on May 3rd, 2007
I love that the websites of the MPAA and AACSLA still contain absolutely no mention of this incident.