BUT DON’T U STEALTH EDIT UR BLOG!!!!

It’s a tempest in a teacup, really, ’cause ultimately the codes and keys never disappear (witness DeCSS code). The **AA organizations will flail about legally, and in the short term hurt people, but in the longer term, they invariably lose, so long as they fail to understand the problem that they want to solve, which is to prevent access to material they want to sell to people (ie allow access). They are fundamentally opposing goals. The only way they can truly keep it out of the hands of those who end up not paying for it, is to not distribute it at all. Maybe they’ll eventually take thier ball and go home.

In some ways, I don’t view that possibility as an entirely bad thing.

Look up Ed Felton’s Freedom To Tinker blog, he talks about it on an ongoing basis.

BTW, I don’t think you can trademark numbers; witness the nameshift of windows from 98 to XP - pratically motivated, as I understood at the time, because versioning numbers weren’t trademarkable, but ‘XP’ could be, as can ‘Vista’.

What the processing key can be, is a trade secret, which is protected only for as long as it is secret. Once in the public domain, I don’t think there’s provision that a trade secret can be ’shoved back in the bottle’, per se, though those that release the secret can be penalized. What the **AA orgs fail to realize, is that those secrets are not secret (both practically and legally) whenever you give them to the customer in a disc player.

But IANAL, I am Metal Tim…

True, and thus you see the heavily lobbied DMCA kick in and a lobby to have the same introduced in Canada et al. Just recently Canada was put on a “Watch list” by the USA for copyright violations against - you guess it - the movie industry. It is a crock and an attempt to get you, the consumer, to purchase and repurchase the same content over and over!