History has a tendency to repeat itself. Tonight we have seen it with AACS LA’s futile efforts to remove a certain hex string (so called processing key) from Internet. As seen with DeCSS before, the net community reacts to this type of censorship attempt with extreme and creative fury. This time the main event took place in Digg, which decided to pull the first few posts about the leak. Instead of letting go, the users revolted and filled the site about stories about the key and metastories about the event:

Ed Felten has already blogged about the event:

My guess is that AACS LA miscalculated, thinking that a few demand letters would succeed in suppressing the key. As the key spread, it seemed natural to continue sending letters — to do otherwise would be an admission of defeat. Now the key is spread so widely that there’s no point in sending any more letters.

I believe that he missed one point here. The letters are being send by Proskauer Rose LLP, which most likely gets payed for each of the demand-letter they send. So they don’t really mind even if the outcome is actually very counter-productive for their client. Then again, it will be interesting to see what is their client’s reaction to the outcome..