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