As some of you might know, the protection of Blu-Ray, and HD-DVD movies is based on a 'secret' key. You need the key to watch protected movies.
The (software)players for these movies are able to 'decrypt' these keys from the disc containing the movie. So you already have these keys on the disc. They (the movie companies) just try to hide them from the user (security through obscurity).
This is not strange that they use this scheme. It's just the way DRM works on these discs. Due to the lame-ass DMCA law in the United States, it's ILLEGAL to try to find the key on the disc :???: .
Somehow a HD-DVD key got discovered (or leaked), and it's going around the great Internet. Several websites have been approached by lawfirms to take the pages down.
This key is represented by a hexidecimal code. How the hell is it possible to declare a hexidecimal string illegal?? The same string can also be represented by a different format (e.g. BASE64). Is this also illegal?
Since we dont know other hex keys for decrypting copy protected content, every other string of hex codes might also be illegal. Image this; what if the 'next' key might represent the number pi (03 14 15 92 6.....)? Does that mean that all math books need to be burned?
Just another example of the fucked up DMCA law in the US.
The complete key:
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0