09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Michael Ayers, the chairman of the AACS LA has drawn the following analogy on the attack on the aacs implementation of drm through the publishing of the aacs processing key:
"If the local neighborhood gang is throwing rocks at your house, some people might tell you not to call the police because they will just throw bigger rocks,"
He concludes that you must call the police to protect yourself. However i think that it is important here to extend the analogy that he uses, when we do we can see that the civil disobedience surrounding the publishing of this number and aacs la's issuing of cease and desist communiques are only part of a bigger picture.
The analogy should be extended as follows, that although the house may belong to aacs la the they have built it on land that does not belong to them, it's land that belongs to the consumers (i.e. fair use: backups, format changes (e.g. tx to a hard drive),compatibility with software (Linux) and other hardware) one can argue that the occupation of the land is immoral and probably illegal considering fair use rights. The DMCA is protecting an illegal /immoral occupation. The people "throwing rocks" are the oppressed who have been turned into refugees of their own media.
The publication of the processing key achieves two things for the oppressed:
1. It is a protest to the occupation in the form of civil disobedience.
2. It allows one to regain ones fair use rights (by removing the restrictions on the media).
To quote and by no means to diminish a greater more profound struggle, the day consumers overthrow DRM is the day on which we can proclaim:
"Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
