HD DVD Crack, A Digital Revolt, and The Digg Response
What is all the hubbub about you ask? Well its this…
09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-cO
or this
The c0 stands for Crime Zero
Yup… to the average viewer just a string of code but to the trained eye a line of hex numbers and with a bit of back ground information on there use they are way more then just numbers. Those simple numbers represent an exploit in the HD DVD DRM (digital rights management, and wow that was a lot of abbreviation’s) thus provide a way to illegally copy HD DVD’s (but only if your using linux). Not that big of a deal when you think about it given the fact that most DRM’s have been cracked in some way and if they aren’t already they will be eventually. What makes this really good is when it get political.::Insert Digital Revolt Here::
So this type geek stuff is a common day occurrence on the internet and its many social bookmarking sites like Digg.com. But when the cease and desist notice shows up its time to think about how you want to play the legal game. This is what was on the minds of Digg.com’s Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson, and the Digg legal team. They were faced with a cease and desist saying that the content which they where hosting was in breach of the digital millennium copyright act (DMCA) and as a result it needed to be removed. This of course if a problem for a social new bookmarking site where the whole nature of the site revolves around freedom and the ability to democratically control the sites content. However, the users of the Digg don’t have a threat of lawsuit starring at them and the Digg team needed to act. They responded by removing all comments and posts containing the code from the site (the full response from CEO Jay Adelson can be found here). This action led to what an out burst from the Digg community and as a result the site was flooded with submissions containing the banned content from out raged users. It reached a point where Digg was basically hijacked by making every post on the front page of a post containing the banned content. This lasted for hours and eventually led to a response from Digg founder Kevin Rose where he then, in the face of a digital revolt on his estimated $60 million dollar site, changed Digg’s stance on the HD DVD crack stating the there would no longer be moderation on the topic and that if they lose “then what the hell, at least we died trying” (the full response can be found here).
So now that the scene is dieing down and people are cooling off what can be said of all this? Well, I get the feeling that while I am happy to see Digg stand up for its users it is only happening because they were faced with the issue of losing them to begin with. Digg is in a lose lose situation, where they either lose the very thing that keeps Digg alive, the people, or risk getting shut down by what would probably be a much larger company holding a big fat law suit. To complicate matters the users then force Digg to either shut the site down themselves by flooding content faster then they could remove it. And to top it all off, because Digg made the decision to remove the content in the first place, they have already lost the integrity that made Digg what it was. So now the only question left is, how will the Digg community respond in the aftermath of all this? Will order be restored to the democratic system? Will the users that left return? Only time will tell I suppose. Until next time…
Adept