Doing Business As 09 F9

My Clarion West 2008 classmate Rajan Khanna snapped the above photograph of Kate and I at NYC’s bar dba (the 41 First Avenue location) on Thursday May 27th 2010, two days before she and I’s wedding. The bar was great — examples of its background music, so unlike Fort Worth playlists, are sufficient proof of that for me: “Would?” by Alice in Chains, “Jane Says” by Jane’s Addiction, “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” by The Ramones — and seeing long-time friends there (Theresa! Janna!) made me exuberant. Especially when Raj said: “Douglas, you’re all grown up now.” Raj, thanks!

Check out my T-shirt, by the way. This will be old news to many, but the hexadecimal number printed on it, 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 (which in regular decimal notation is 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640 — thirteen undecillion something), can be used in various ways — for example, as a tongue twister, as a song lyric, or as a key to break HD-DVD and Blu-ray copy protection. In 2007, in response to the number becoming publicly known, the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator LLC (a trade organization providing encryption technology and backed by Disney, Microsoft, and others) sent sites such as Digg.com take-down demand letters that claimed their publication of or trafficking in the number constituted violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and asked for the webpages to be removed, as though webpages aren’t constantly cached and archived elsewhere anyway. (Clay Shirky discusses Digg’s counter-response in his interesting book Here Comes Everybody — the book’s title, I’ll pedantically note, comes from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.) The legal threats cued the Streisand effect, wherein efforts to silence something controversial only cause it to be repeated more loudly: everyday netizens republished the number an undecillion times over, including on a certain black EDUN LIVE Essential T-shirt worn by me, courtesy of zazzle.com. Although it’s feasible to legally threaten a small number of people (such as those running Digg.com), it’s impossible to legally threaten a vast number of people (such as each and every podunk blogger posting about 09 F9); this basic principle of mass civil disobedience, used by the pro-piracy netizens, now prevents — I presume — additional take-down demand letters from being sent, as in, for example, to me. The world has been made safe for long strings of alphanumerics.

My interest in the number have far more to do with legal philosophy than me pirating anything, just so you know. Since I can’t say anything useful about copyright and copyleft at the moment, however, I’ll just post some links to sites that do say interesting
things about them; I don’t necessarily agree with their views, of course. Here: the Electronic Frontier Foundation on 09 F9, an Abjectivist advocating strict intellectual property laws, and Cory Doctorow’s nonfiction collection Content.