Seems like digg is down for maintenance anyway. “and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code”… but they put the site offline. Whatever. It was okay to delete that story in my opinion, but why did they had to ban a bunch of users? That’s what I don’t understand.

I just spoke to Rose, he says the site is getting unprecedented traffic and they are working to keep it online. Works for me currently.

Ooh yes, online again just now. I’d still like to hear a reason from Kevin Rose why they banned users. The upcoming episode of Diggnation will be interesting..

I followed the whole thing from the sidelines… wow. It was incredible to watch the whole thing unfold and then completely explode. The people were pretty unhappy….

If nothing else it was interesting to see the community give the site no option but to do what they wanted, especially after Digg deleted a few posts and a few accounts. I guess we have a long way to go before we really understand the potential of the online society….

Down goes Digg, it’s amazing what’s going on over there

The ‘mob’ isn’t always right.

Hum, I wonder how it would have been if it wasnt the MPAA or the RIAA and something that was black and white illegal. It is amazing to see how the community reacted.

Great!!

Finally users won.

This is one of the reasons I can’t stand digg. Its users are among the most childish on the internet. The front page is currently 100% stories with this code, with titles like “CHCEK OUT MY NEW FAVORITE NUMBER LOLZ” Uhh yah that’s funny haha!

This is like sitting ringside in a boxing match that is about to begin. This should be fun if it drags out. Imagine how much attention this C&D order brought to this subject. Wow.

Funny how in an effort to stop the spread of this info they unleashed the full power of Digg and now millions of people now know about this that otherwise wouldn’t have noticed.

I got a C&D order for telling the truth about myspaceguardian a few weeks ago on my crappy blog. Makes me want to put the post back up.

digg has jumped the shark

Usually systems with distributed sources of value are robust — it’s amazing how quickly this happened.

This whole thing just goes to show how powerful the digg community is. The homepage is down for maintenance at the moment - but if you head to digg.com/news you can still see the front page.

Michael, being a lawyer and all, it would be interesting to get your opinion on whether or not a company can copyright a number?

I think they took it down as al the subdomains are still up and running smoothly. They are probably just trying to figure out what to so.

I think the Digg crew didn’t handle it wery well at first.

They should probably have posted an entry in their blog prior to the deletion of the story, perhaps even showing a copy of the letter from the MPAA, and redirecting the anger towards who really deservers it, instead of deleting the story and reacting afterwards.

In a way, I’m surprised they didn’t see it coming. It would have been soooo easy to turn the gun around, and yet, they pointed it right at their throat. It’s not like this is the first C&D letter a UGC site gets, for goddsake…

I submitted a story that got over 1500 diggs in under 20min. I personally think its too little too late, digg will never be the same. It is in the heat of the moment, when a corporation is breathing down your neck, and your left to make a choice - users - or the company, that the true colors show. Kevin sacrificed a million plus people who made digg what it is, to avoid the POSSIBILITY of a law suit.

For all we know, they got advise from their legal staff detailing how this is a weak case for the corporation.

Kudoes to everyone in the community who forced Team Digg to backtrack to threats from MPAA

I have been watching this all unfold the last few hours…incredible!

Funny thing is, the supposed HD-DVD unlocking key is for Linux only, yet the firestorm rolled through. It was quite a sight to witness.

This is a wake-up call for the old media. Net citizens’ hatred for DRM, RIAA, MPAA, and VIAAcom is reaching a crescendo.

Great comment Mike Levington.

Yeah this is precisely the reason I read this site and others instead of Digg. The content is chosen by people with a financial stake in making the site appealing to users. I’ll take that motivation anytime, anywhere, over the democracy of Digg.

Digg is a combination of stories important to zealous people with a lot of free time on their hands, and people with a lot of incentive to use it to drive traffic to their sites. Neither’s goals are in line with my own, and neither group necessarily has increasing the value of Digg to the users as their main goal.

The whole AACS thing is barely interesting, much less compelling, and a page full of stories about it might as well be a 500 Internal Server Error to me. Who cares if it’s offline right now. It already was.

LOL

Get a grip and come back to reality. This was just an outlay to show how immature mob mentality can get. It wasn’t noble. It wasn’t graceful. It was just outright pathetic as the day went on.

Then Kevin Rose gave in. Hip hip hooray? You’re happy? Let’s all resort to being 3 and throw tantrums until we get our way. Way to show your colors.

Also Arun, or anyone, what exactly did the users win here? The exodus of people looking for interesting stories? A group temper tantrum, or just a little power trip for the mob? Hey, congratulations, that’s just fantastic.

Tough call which site is more myopic these days between Digg and Reddit.

Copyright exclusively covers “creative” works and there’s no way in heck even the broadest interpretation of this could include a random number sequence. There’s just no way. Whether or not there are legal implications other than copyright I can’t speak for.

Regardless, kudos to Rose and crew for having the b_lls to do the right thing.

Alaska, i don’t think you fully understand the implications. They sold out dude.

Thanks for this article, Michael. I’m frankly amazed at how quickly the user community mobilized on this. It reminds me of something Guy Kawasaki said at a presentation earlier this month:

“For a startup to survive, it has to always 09F911029D74 at full E35BD84156 C5635688C0!”

What percentage of people even care or are interested in this key? I’m a pretty savvy computer person and I don’t have any idea what to do with it… half the other guys I talked to today were like WTF is this key thing??

@Kewt, please don’t forget how Digg users handled the “Photoshopped” issue with maturity.Instead of banning the users, they could have just posted an explanation at their blog.

Michael,

This post is much more Crunch network style than the very poor one on the issue on CrunchGear (not that you wrote it or anything, but still).

Thank you.

It also helps when your CEO is the founder and former CTO of your colo (Equinix). If someone pulls the plug it’s likely the upstream provider under pressure, yet Digg is pretty integrated with that stream.

To the people claiming that this was merely an immature act, how about you have a clue about the issues at hand. A pseudo random hex string should not be copyrightable!
This unreasonable censorship must be stopped and for once, the people had their way. Are you retards grasping this?

Web 3.0 The Users Revolt

Joe Graham: didn’t Digg “sell out” the day the company took money from VCs?

All this drama just goes to show how smart companies like News Corp. were to apparently turn down the “opportunity” to acquire Digg for a 9 figure amount. Outside of the pure insanity of paying 9 figures for something that has unimpressive monetization and apparently/reportedly hasn’t broken even yet, this is the perfect example of how the “wisdom of the crowd” can just as easily become the “stupidity of the crowd.” Without debating whether or not Digg sold out its users, I tend to agree with Kewtr. In an age where the democratization of news, apparently provided by services like Digg, is heralded as the greatest thing since sliced bread, it’s easy to forget that there are significant advantages to news services with professional editors. The content on MSNBC or CNN might not always be great and I don’t have a say in what gets to the front page, but I also don’t have to worry that the editors of these services are going to go apeshit tonight and that I won’t be able to get any news tomorrow.

Bottom line: Digg isn’t in control of its own service and regardless of what you think of Digg and the people who use it, to create true business value you have to exert some control over the services you run. Institutional investors haven’t put money into Digg so that Digg can fight legal battles against The Man. They put money in hoping to make more money. A business model for Digg looked elusive before this; now the entire service model looks shaky and even if Digg survives, I think a lot of permanent damage has been done. At the very least, I can’t imagine anybody who was looking at Digg as a possible acquisition not having some serious concerns.

Most people just don’t care about their right to post encryption keys, and the fact that this tiny group has managed to overtake digg really shows their community is a pretty narrow group.

A geek riot is what drudge calls it

http://www.drudgereport.com/

An optimistic take might be that this is the kind of shared trauma that brings a community together, while providing the noise and smoke cover to frag the less-helpful members. It’s not altogether surprising that this sort of event sequence would drive the Diggers off the reservation, but the propagation speed and extent of the hysterics does sort of point to the need for more after-school programs or something.

Web nerd shout-out to timeless and the other folks manning the squirt guns keeping the Digg servers cool tonight.

is this going to hit mainstream press?

One unstated concern is that of HD-DVD. How will this impact that product? They ultimately need the support of the MPAA in their competition with Blu-Ray. If HD-DVD is the format known to be universally crackable, poof, a billion dollar business is gone.

I’m just glad I didn’t buy that $200 HD-DVD player.

Thanks for your take, Mike. I watched (and participated) in the entire thing from start to finish. I was mostly pissed that Digg neglected to mention that HD-DVD was a sponsor when they first started taking down stories.

I wish Kathy were still blogging so she could revive her Wisdom/Stupidity of Crowds post. Maybe Danah has some thoughts on the issue.

I agree with the users on this one. They win. I just wish they could turn their power on some issue that actually mattered.

have they release Back to the Future I-III on HD-DVD???

Paul, good point.

And Michael Arrington’s approach to censorship is….

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.

What surprises me in these matters is that *visitors* of a website feel they have some sort of right to determine what is or isn’t published on this site. I don’t care how much time you spend submitting stories or digging comments, you’re a visitor and you should behave as such. This includes not breaking the rules set by your host. If you don’t like the rules, don’t come and visit. How reasonable or unreasonable the rules are is completely irrelevant.

Why is mob mentality rewarded online?

I rest my case: 25 - 30 year old immature virgins make up the majority of Diggers. The sausage fest has gone out of control.

Spot on Menno.

Some of the digg stories mention protecting their “freedom of speech”. Surely there is no such thing on a private website. In giving the users power some appear to have let it go to their heads and now regard digg as their own. This is wrong.

Digg has proved to me that groupthink and mob mentality, whilst having their place, lead to half-truths and inaccuracies being propagated. Not how I want my news delivered.

From a social critic’s standpoint, that mob rule would amount to e-looting is no surprise. From a legal standpoint, that a number can’t be copyrighted may be true…for now. Scary thing is that while a number can’t be copyrighted, genes can be patented. Total information control would be the next natural step in the military-industrial-corporate complex. So, copyrighting a number, may be in our future, as cooler heads have not prevailed of late.

It is good to see that, for now, information can still enjoy a relatively free exchange on the internet. It is a bit disappointing though that it should find its popular rallying cry in motives as ignoble as not having to pay for access to creative works when there are plenty in the world who do not even have the luxury to be online at all. In other words, for any internet user to be whining about the costs of HD-DVD movies and the egregious injustices meted out upon their hapless souls needs a reality check.

I, for one, am not happy about the state of the entertainment industry. But neither do I suppose that some inalienable right of mine has been violated on this ground. Better to defend others’ rights who are less able to defend themselves, if righteousness is has any value.

“I think the Digg crew didn’t handle it wery well at first.

They should probably have posted an entry in their blog prior to the deletion of the story, perhaps even showing a copy of the letter from the MP