On 5/4/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
The problem is that it's not at all clear that this act is illegal; it would only become clear if, say, _Wired_ were taken to court and lost.
Except... 2600 was already taken to court and lost. And and lost on the appeal... and where the fact of this instance differ from the prior case, I believe they all differ towards the direction of finding for AACS-LC. ... At least you could try to argue that decss served important research purposes.... but a simple opaque 256-bit random value?
That's the crux of the dispute over whether we should include this information or not. As is the case with libel, there's a balance between wanting to avoid breaking the law on the one hand, and being so excessively cautious that we remove information that is both useful and legal to publish, on the other.
The AACS key is not useful... except for an illegial purpose (the circumvention of the AACS protection system). If it were otherwise useful I'd see a significant amount of merit in your argument.