Following the latest hacking attempts of the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies, the MPAA and AACS, through its lawyers, have been sending takedown notices to sites that have published information that circumvents the next generation formats. The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the AACS LA (Advanced Access Content System Authority), which is responsible for the protection used in both HD DVD and Blu-Ray movie releases, have ordered blogs, popular news aggregation site Digg.com and Google to put offline pages that link to a sixteen hexadecimal key known as "Processing Key", which unlocks the protection mechanisms used to prevent free copying of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies.

The crack first appeared online in mid-February on a Doom 9 forum. Since then, numerous bloggers have posted the key on their websites or linked to the website detailing the original crack.

Digg.com immediately removed all the stories related to the cracks, which were submitted by users.

" We?ve been notified by the owners of this intellectual property that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights. In order to respect these rights and to comply with the law, we have removed postings of the key that have been brought to our attention," said Digg CEO Jay Adelson. "..We all need to work together to protect Digg from exposure to lawsuits that could very quickly shut us down," he added.

AACS LA also send a letter to Google last month, asking to remove all the search results related to the Procesing Keys. A simple Google query for the 16 hexadecimal code comes up with almost 300,000 search results.

The specific code affects particular high-definition players and only then if a user has a good programming expertise.