It’s no secret that most tech savvy people despise digital rights management (DRM). So it’s not entirely surprising that last week, Digg users revolted.

DVD publishers add DRM to their movie releases so they can control whether the dvds can be copied and even what devices are allowed to play the dvds. In February 2007, Arnezami, a hacker on the Doom9 forum who was frustrated because his purchased HD-DVD movies wouldn’t play on his Linux-based computer (I believe), cracked the code and published the 128-bit number on the web. The Wired blog wrote up an article about what that meant for the future of DRM.

The AACS Licensing Authority recently took a stand against those who published the number on the web and set out a bunch of legal threats. In protest, Digg users began voting for sites that contained links to the crack.

The Digg staff, who had received one of these legal threats, decided to comply with the law and removed several links to pages with the published code. Digg users got mad and started a massive campaign to get every link on Digg’s front page to point to sites linking to the code. Eventually, Digg founder, Kevin Rose gave up the fight against its community members and posted his comments on the Digg blog.

So what’s the issue at stake here? Why all the fuss? First off, the AACS Licensing Authority isn’t trying to copyright a 128-bit number, like many sites proclaimed. (For an interesting legal perspective on if you can actually copyright a number, see Ben Manevitz’s post, You CAN Copyright a Number. But Not As Such.) They are simply claiming that the key violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)’s ban on any “component” or “part” of a “technology” that circumvents AACS, according to Fred von Lohmann of the EFF in a great legal primer on the issue.

And the user revolt hasn’t deterred Michael Ayers, the chairman of the AACS-LA, from threatening to go after all the sites that have published the code.

In all of this, there’s been talk about what this means - and a number of sites have cropped up poking fun at the issue. One of the more imaginative sites explains how you can get your own 128 bit number that you can claim violates your rights via the DMCA. The idea is that you can publish your own copyrighted stuff and then encrypt it with your own 128-bit number. Thus, if anyone attempts to publish that number, you can sue them (or at least threaten them) just as the AACS Licensing Authority.

And of course, it proves that Digg users wield a heck of a lot of power over the website.