Ed Felten has a great rumination on the AACS key debacle in which a copy-prevention software vendor is threatening to sue hundreds of websites for publishing a 16-byte number; Felten points out that it's not just censorship that's upsetting the Internet — it's the absurdity of claiming to own a number:
While it's obvious why the creator of a movie or a song might deserve some special claim over the use of their creation, it's hard to see why anyone should be able to pick a number at random and unilaterally declare ownership of it. 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. It's just a number they picked out of a hat. And now they own it?
As if that's not weird enough, there are actually millions of other numbers (other keys used in AACS) that AACS LA claims to own, and we don't know what they are. When I wrote the thirty-digit number that appears above, I carefully avoided writing the real 09F9 number, so as to avoid the possibility of mind-bending lawsuits over integer ownership. But there is still a nonzero probability that AACS LA thinks it owns the number I wrote.
When the great mathematician Leopold Kronecker wrote his famous dictum, "God created the integers; all else is the work of man", he meant that the basic structure of mathematics is part of the design of the universe. What God created, AACS LA now wants to take away.
