Millions has been spent on state-of-the-art DRM (digital rights management) encryption in order to keep piracy from hitting as hard as it does with regular DVDs. At least they have that, right? At least nobody can pirate this new technology and blow the whole profit margin, right? Wrong.

A few weeks ago, you may have noticed a bit of Internet uproar over a hacker named Muslix64 who managed to break the encryption technology on a Blu-Ray disc and successfully store a back-up of the disc on a computer. You can probably be sure that all elementary school tours of Sony head offices were probably cancelled due to excessive profanity. To be honest, I would probably feel the same way too. It must have come as a massive relief this past weekend when Muslix64 announced that HD-DVD encryption has also been cracked, and that an HD-DVD version of the movie Lord of War was available for download through bittorrent. The file was 19.6GB in size and it has since been taken down.

This served as proof millions of dollars of DRM won’t always work and managed to prove some people would waste a quarter of their hard drive space to watch a Nicolas Cage movie. Both instances are strange, but true.

For another piracy-is-alive angle, check out the goings on in the frigid Northern Atlantic. The Pirate Party, Sweden’s tenth largest political party and operator of Internet piracy haven thepiratebay.com, is rumored to be mulling a bid to purchase the Principality of Sealand. You probably remember Sealand from an old episode of Dateline NBC or 20/20 about a guy who took over an abandoned oil rig in England’s North Sea and used a loophole in British law to declare the oil rig its own sovereign nation. It is self-powering and has been outfitted with a massive number of Internet servers. Turns out the Sealand people consider it to be a bit of a seller’s market these days and have been inviting bids to take over this fledgling little republic that thrives on the principles of porn and internet gambling.

Needless to say, thepiratebay.com has expressed interest in purchasing the rig and its servers, with the intention of hosting the world’s software piracy out of reach from the long arm of the law. Do you think Interpol has jurisdiction out there?

Andrew Rideout