Can a company own a number?

Posted on May 4, 2007 by Eric

The AACS-LA claims to own the hexadecimal number 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0 (decimal 13256278887989457651018865901401704640), and is threatening those who post it online, even though they also claim that the distribution of the number is not a problem for the viability of the AACS system.  If it’s not a problem, why do they need to threaten people who post it?

Note that copyright law only protects creative works, while Ed Felten observes that “There is nothing creative about this number — indeed, it was chosen by a method designed to ensure that the resulting number was in no way special.”

The number is also not a “circumvention device” within the meaning of the DMCA.

This entry was posted in Blog/website/news comments, Copyright, DRM. Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to Can a company own a number?

  1. Hanford says:
    May 4, 2007 at 2:47 PM

    EFF has a good article on this, especially:

    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.

    http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005229.php

  2. Eric says:
    May 4, 2007 at 3:04 PM

    Thanks for the link. However, I don’t think a number can be considered to be a “technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof”. In particular, the EFF thinks that the AACS-LA considers the number to be a component. However, even if the number is a component, it does not meet any of the three requirements of the DMCA:

    It is not “primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title”, since the number is in fact used for legitimate acces to the work. The number was “designed or produced” by the AACS-LA themselves!

    It does not have “only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title”, since it has a significant use in allowing me to access the work from Linux (in full compliance with copyright law).

    It is not “marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title”. It is not “marketed” at all; no one is offering the number in commerce, for circumvention or otherwise.

    Eric

Leave a Reply