Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Digg has been feeling the power of Web 2.0 this week. AACS, the encryption used for HD DVD and Blu Ray, has been cracked and the processing key has been leaked all over the Net. Once the key was leaked, the lawyers took their time, but eventually sent out their cease and desist notices. Digg was one of many sites to receive the notice, and started to pull stories that mentioned the key. Soon afterwards, users started to notice their missing stories, resulting in a flood of new stories being submitted, many of which were dugg to their main page. Eventually, the first four pages on their site were almost entirely about the processing key.

Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, finally caved in and made the following blog posting: http://blog.digg.com/?p=74

Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0
by Kevin Rose at 9pm, May 1st, 2007 in Digg Website

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.

Even though the code requires both technical expertise and specialized software to actually use, it's a powerful lesson in the futility of censorship in the digital world.

Frank Ribitch