AACS threatens Google and other websites over links to Keys

[Ian]

AACS seems to be taking a page from the MPAA and RIAA. If you can't come up with a decent DRM... threaten people with lawsuits. They're going as far as to threaten people that simply linked to a page with keys.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=382

I just don't get it. A link is a link and trying to censor who links to what is not going to work. The AACS seems to want to control who links to the Doom 9 forum post relating to the AACS cracking attempts (direct link here) because all that's left for AACS is to try to limit people knowing how ineffective AACS is becoming. Not only will this kind of thing fail (because ultimately it draws more attention to the thing they're trying to hide) but it draws more people into the debate and these people, given the circumstances, are not going to be sympathetic to the AACS.

Here's the letter they sent to Google:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=03218

[Ian]

John C. Dvorak has a great article about this whole fiasco and how lawyers are stupid when it comes to these sorts of things.

short link

First of all, lawyers can be idiots and have no sense of public relations. According to the New York Times and others, this entire current fiasco was started by the too-common threatening letter.

When an attorney sends out threatening letters to people these days, especially to bloggers and other Internet mavens, these documents get scanned and published online to be widely distributed.

Most of these letters are written to sound intimidating, often with a lot of language that's mean-spirited. People, sometimes by the millions, read these and get angry not at the lawyer, but at the company that hired the lawyer. This can lead to a public-relations disaster.

Once something goes out on the Net, it gets copied and posted elsewhere. Even if the original is taken down, other versions appear immediately.
The legal profession has not adjusted to this new phenomenon, and as long as they are being paid by the billable hour, they figure the PR folks (also paid by the billable hour) can fix any problem.

[Wesociety]

I had to laugh at the AACS legal threat letter, what a bad move...

And YES, it definitely did draw more attention to the matter, making the online community distribute and communicate the processing key even more than it was before...