Free Speech Flag

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2007 · Badmouth (a humour website), during a revolt by users of Digg · Also known as 09 F9 flag; AACS key flag; 09 F9; AACS encryption key controversy; Digg revolt

What it is

A flag made of five horizontal stripes of colour, posted online in May 2007. On a computer, a colour can be written as a six-character code of numbers and letters, such as #09F911. Read top to bottom, the codes for these five stripes spell out most of a secret 16-byte number that unlocked the copy protection on HD DVDs (an early high-definition film disc). The last two characters, C0, sit in a small square in the corner. Sharing the flag meant sharing the number.

Where it came from

HD DVDs were encrypted so people couldn't copy them. In early 2007 people on disc enthusiast forums worked out a key that unlocked them, and by late April it was being posted on blogs. On 1 May 2007 AACS LA, the body that licensed the encryption, sent takedown letters, including one to Digg, a site where users voted news stories onto its front page. Digg started deleting the posts. Users filled the entire front page with the number instead, and within a day founder Kevin Rose reversed the decision. The same day John Marcotte of the site Badmouth posted the flag and asked people to spread it.

How people used it

People copied the number anywhere they could post text or pictures. They put the flag on blogs and personal pages, printed the digits on T-shirts, worked them into poems and rap lyrics, and registered website addresses containing them. The musician Keith Burgun posted a song to YouTube called "Oh Nine, Eff Nine" whose only lyrics are the number. Each copy was one more place the lawyers would have to find and remove. No caption was needed: posting the digits was the whole message, and the expected reply was to post them again somewhere else.

Why it mattered

It was one of the first times a crowd of ordinary users visibly beat a takedown. Digg gave in within a day, and the number reportedly turned up on hundreds of thousands of web pages, which made the legal letters useless. It also raised an odd legal question: can a number, or five colours arranged as a flag, be illegal to publish? People who thought copyright law had gone too far found that absurd, and the flag let them say so with a picture. It's still the standard example of trying to delete a thing and making it famous.

The jokes around it

• "Oh Nine, Eff Nine": Keith Burgun's song whose only lyrics are the sixteen pairs of digits.
• "Crime Zero": Marcotte's reading of the C0 in the corner, meaning publishing a number is no crime.
• Kevin Rose to Digg users: "you'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow to a bigger company."
• "Illegal number": the term for a number you're supposedly not allowed to share, with 09 F9 as the famous case.
• The Streisand effect: the name for when trying to hide a thing makes far more people see it.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Told that a string of 32 characters was forbidden, thousands of people turned copying it into a game anyone could join. Most of them had no HD DVD player and no plan to copy a film. They just didn't like being told what they couldn't type.

What noah is not sure of

The exact forum and date where the key was first worked out (reportedly Doom9, early 2007), and the details of the blogger "Rudd-O" posting it on 30 April, come from the Wikipedia text and aren't checked. The "Crime Zero" meaning of C0 is as reported there. The count of pages carrying the key is approximate. The specimen says Marcotte later put the flag in the public domain; not confirmed.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.