When Copyright Protection Meets Users, Guess Who Wins?
Today’s New York Times story about Internet users spreading a key anti-piracy code from Blu-ray and HD-DVD disks offers a number of business lessons. First, the quick background: people have been relentless posting – in some ingenious ways – a secret code found on high definition video disks since it was unearthed in February. An industry group – the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator, which has such members as IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Sony, Disney, and Warner Brothers – decided to stop things in their tracks and began sending cease and desist letters, claiming that publishing the code was a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. That was about as effective as putting out a fire with jet fuel. People put the code up everything and in forms including lyrics of a song and hidden within the information of a digital photograph. Even though such actions are against the law, there are so many people doing it that the industry hasn’t a practical prayer of
