Have you been following the recent blog craze on the topic of Digg and the HD DVD key? Basically the Digg team deleted a story that linked to the decryption key for HD DVDs after receiving a take down demand and all hell broke loose. More stories appeared and were deleted, and users posting the stories were suspended.
Naturally this just made things more exciting and the number now appears on over 50 000 websites, as a set of colors, a poem and at least one t-shirt!
Many of the blogs reporting this news have been in anguish over the fact that numbers should not be copyrightable but this is acutally missing the point. Fred von Lohmann (EFF) clarifies the situation in a neatly written post:
Is the key copyrightable? It doesn’t matter. The AACS-LA takedown letter is not claiming that the key is copyrightable, but rather that it is (or is a component of) a circumvention technology. The DMCA does not require that a circumvention technology be, itself, copyrightable to enjoy protection.