That’s right folks, digg.com is Out of Service thanks to hundreds and thousands of geeks around the world posting the HD-DVD code to break the encryption so “we the people” can create back ups of our movies.
But Kevin Rose in true geek fashion appears to be giving the finger to the man:
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.
Digg on,
Kevin
This reminds me of late 1999 when the whole DeCSS decrypting algorithm was released into the wild so the content on DVD’s encrypted using the Content-Scrambling System could be copied.
Oh how the lawsuits flew around back then and some of them didn’t even get settled until 2003 and 2004.
It will be interesting to see what comes of this in the weeks ahead.
…and now, off to the 24 hour Wal-Mart to pick up a cheap HD-DVD player.
Oh and DMCA, I’m not the droid you’re looking for… move along…
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