Dear Bluegoddess,

This number:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Which is a hexadecimal integer, is claimed to be owned by a company called AACS.

Basically, this is a number that a significantly technical person could use to decrypt Blue Ray disks.

The story is that the AACS came up with the encryption algorithms, and are saying that they own this number.

That's right, the claim to own this number, a integer, it's supposedly copyrighted by them. That is this number, plus hundreds of others that no one knows about.

That's like saying "I own the number 124" and anyone caught using the number 124 must pay me a usage fee. Lets make it an even 100 dollars if the number is being used personally, or 1,250.56$ if it is going to be used commercially.

The number got posted to a bunch of websites, and the company sent cease / desist letters and has taken many of them to court.

This is totally outrageous, and completely un-American.

So the appropriate response is of course to post this number to every single website, forum, blog, email, and where ever you can. That way when the people who got sued go to court, they can claim that this "copyrighted" information is in public use and then get out of the lawsuit. And of course, hopefully the judge will see that copy righting integers is like, I don't know, stupid beyond all belief.


Love ya,
Your Husband