The Digg-ital Riot

Subtitle: Can Numbers Be Illegal?

UPDATE: The MPAA can take down all the sites they want, but can they take the shirt off your back? Most likely not, so if you want some hex pride and are to lazy to make your own, Nerdy Shirts has a solution.

Some of you might have been sleeping last night, but a huge riot was breaking out all over the internets. In what will be remembered as the Digg Revolution of 2007 (by me, at least), thousands of users swarmed Digg.com, making sure a certain story could not be removed fast enough. The site even went down for a while, when it came back up the founder had these words to say;

"Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Digg on,

Kevin (Rose)"

Long live freedom of speech!

The controversy started when a user posted a link to a story about a key being found that essentially lets you crack the DRM on the new HD-DVDs. The story was removed, and then another went up. That was pulled as well, and like a mythical hydra every time one story was deleted, two more would spring up in its place. At the height of the chaos this is what my newsfeed looked like:



There were fake stories, a new MySpace, blogs about blogs about it, or sometimes just the key itself, over and over.


I am not going to post this magic key for legal reasons, but if you are really curious... Did I mention the pictures were clickable?

Timeline Via Consumerist