Saturday, May 5, 2007

AACS Fiasco Wikipedia Roundup

After having a few days to percolate, Wikipedia's talk pages are now a tantalizing soup of arguments regarding the AACS processing key fiasco. The main debate attempts to resolve the question of "to publish or not to publish," although the discussion spills onto other intriguing topics as well, such as, "Are the hits on a Google search original research?" ("No original research" is one of Wikipedia's few content policies dictating what is acceptable for inclusion in an article.)

Talk page for "AACS encryption key controversy"

An argument for:
It would be a valuable addition to the article. In fact, it is the very subject of the article. If you don't know the number, this article doesn't tell you what it is. Likewise, a person who sees the number in an unconnected context currently has no way of relating it to this article.
An argument against:
It would be an unnecessary legal risk. Publishing the number may be illegal (see the EFF's article, for example), and could potentially cause Wikipedia to be sued under the DMCA. [...] Even if the chance of legal action is unlikely, and hasn't happened so far, why take the risk? Wikipedia would gain little by including it, and potentially has everything to lose. The risk just isn't worth the benefits.
Also consider taking a look at The Wikipedia "Administrators' noticeboard,"which contains an admin-only discussion about the posting of the key. The administrators seem more fearful of the potential legal consequences, which demonstrates how powerful of a censorship device the DMCA can be.

1 comment:

David Gerard said...

One of the main reasons the key isn't on the article is that it's in the spam filter. Because distributed spam is spam. See Wikipedia:Keyspam. I put in the bit about considering it proper to use orbital laser weapons to burn the key in 500-foot-high letters across the middle of Hollywood, and I still want the key to stay in the spam filter for a while. Because we have the next memespam to preemptively discourage.