It's the most circulated number of the week. Sixteen hexadecimal digits that unlock the wonder of most currently released HD-DVD titles from the surly clutches of the AACS revenue content protection system. Sixteen digits that have been posted in so many places -- and in many cases, removed only to be reposted -- that they're hard to avoid.

Cory Doctorow's class blog for his USC course, "Pwned: How everyone on campus is a copyright criminal" was served a DMCA takedown notice and, on the advice of counsel, removed the offending digits. They were posted to Wikipedia, then removed and locked from reposting. Then the diggstorm came. A slew of digg stories containing the forbidden digits have been posted, made the front page and been removed, only to start again.

Witness the modern equivalent of the 95 thesis' Martin Luther nailed to the door of Wittenburg church. We, digital citizens --commonly referred to by the vulgar term of 'consumers' -- have had enough of content lock-in. We've bought and re-bought entertainment media -- repackaged and regurgitated digital vomitus -- until we're blue in the face. We've been told time and time again that DRM is for our own protection, and we're finally and inconsolably fed up.

As Joe Rogan's character on Newsradio once quite accurately quipped, "Dude, you can't take something off the Internet.. that's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool." The content providers have attempted to do exactly that, remove pee from the proverbial swimming pool that is the Internet and, as we've witnessed so many times before, they've failed miserably.

The bottom line remains, we as consumers, want our content free (as in Freedom) and if we don't get it, we'll take our content free (as in beer).

Is DRM headed the way of the Dodo bird? Depends on who you ask. In a recent survey, performed by Jupiter Research, 62% of European music execs said DRM free music would sell at a quicker pace, and 54% felt current DRM systems were too restrictive. A divide still exists however, as only 48% of major label execs felt DRM was holding back sales, compared with 73% of independent label execs.

I forecast during the last week of 2006 that DRM was going to die a pitiful and ugly death in 2007. Even Steve Jobs recently argued that DRM needed to go, much to the surprise of anyone who's given much thought to the link between iTunes lock in and iPod's success story. So we're warming up for DRM's big funeral, right? Not so fast. Jupiter analyst Mark Mulligan warns, "Despite everything that has been happening the record labels are not about to drop DRM, even though all they are doing is making themselves look even less compelling by using it."

DRM is a lot like hiring Barney Fife to guard your record store. He irritates the paying customers while the shoplifters just laugh behind his back and walk away with the merchandise. How much longer can the Fife-like DRM hang on to a job it does so poorly?

As soon as we heard yesterday that Google was developing its own paid video download service including content from CBS and the NBA, it was pretty obvious that they'd have to arrange some sort of content protection to appease the sorts of people who still think DRM is something other than moot, i.e. the TV execs. According to Tech Dirt (via the WSJ), rather than going with a third-party solution, Google is developing its own in-house DRM. Though holding on to the hope that Google would never go the DRM route is a lost cause, it will be interesting to see what they come up with. Who knows, maybe they'll make it open source.