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.

PWNED Blog Post Included in DMCA Takedown Request

See for yourself.

After following a Reddit link, I quickly saw that Teque5's post "Holy Grail Located: HD-DVD and BLU-RAY Processing Key Found" is included in a list of four different sites/posts that the AACS Licensing Administrator is targeting for the "Illegal Offering of Processing Key to Circumvent AACS Copyright Protection." Google is the recipient of the takedown request dated April 17, 2007 and all the other offending posts are part of the blogspot.com domain. At the time of this writing, the other three posts have been removed.

Google's letter to one of the bloggers says that Google will forcibly remove the offending posts by April 29th, but also inidicates that a counter-notification process is available.

The grinding irony here is that the DMCA takedown notice itself includes most of the processing key in the second URL.