[WikiEN-l] HD DVD key mess - OFFICE/Foundation?

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On 5/3/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Tell me this, please. Is there *anyone* in the world who would walk up
> to a friend and say - hey did you hear the news about [string of hex
> digits]?

Ahem. Existence proof follows:

Just 20 hours or so ago, I did precisely this; after having gone to
the trouble to create a mnemnonic with pseudo-occult undertones, to
ease memorisation.

Now; this only provides a counter-example to the precise wording of
your stipulation. It proves that *someone* (me) _would_ do so. In the
actual case I did *not* go through it, because my friends interrupted
me in the process, wanting to first know what the number was, and
hearing that it was "illegal information" we had a full and frank
discussion about the morality (or otherwise) of merely speaking the
number outloud in a bar. So it does not precisely logically speaking
prove that someone *has* done so.

Note, by the way, that these folks I was meeting with at the time were
specifically people with a strong interest in all video formats (a
regular meeting of scifi/horror movie buffs) and who do infact swap
such and lend between each other (won't stipulate whether anyone of
them privately circumvents any or all copy protection or otherwise
engages in illegal copying).

On the larger issue though (as the above is largely beside the point
from wikipedian purposes) I think we can easily have our cake and eat
it too. Let's not be at the forefront, but not laggards either. A
family friend once gave his opinion about how to best get along with
ones army troop; never be first at anything, and never be last either.
 There is no need for us to blaze the trail on this particular issue
or any like it, but we can and should confidently saunter forward on
it, once the elephants have passed through and trampled a nice solid
path, clearing the bush in their wake.

It is nearly inevitable that this is going to be a case where all
MPAA's horses won't be able to put humpty dumpty back together again,
and after it becomes definitively obvious that is the case of affairs,
and the number indeed has spread far, wide and into authoritative
information outlets, we can safely go with the de facto
non-enforcement of what rights (or not, as the case may in the de jure
sense have been) MPAA might have had to prevent disclosure.

--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]