[Webpub] Digg.com Nearly Explodes Over Movie Codes

[Lisa Mayer]

Did you hear what happened on digg.com yesterday? When some of its  
users posted a 16-digit hexadecimal number that is used to lock up HD- 
DVD movies, Digg removed their posts and terminated their accounts.  
That’s when the action really started happening…from Boing Boing:

The AACS Licensing Authority, which controls the anti-copying  
technology underlying HD-DVD, sent out hundreds of legal threats to  
sites that had posted the key, including Digg. It appears that Digg  
took a pro-active stance and began to seek out new examples of the  
key and delete them immediately, instead of waiting for notice from  
the AACS-LA. It’s likely that their lawyers advised them to take this  
course of action, since the penalties for posting “circumvention  
devices” can be stiff.

Digg’s users revolted at this stricture, and saw to it that every  
single item on the front page of Digg contained the forbidden number.  
Users accused Digg of taking money from the HD-DVD manufacturers  
(Digg ran an ad campaign from the company in the late summer of  
2006), and complained about the site’s deletion of user accounts.

At 9PM last night, Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, posted about this on  
the Digg blog, and said that he would no longer take material down,  
even though it could very well cost him the site. It’s a brave  
stance, and it seems to have quieted the Digg users’ protests.

The drama continues…as of this evening, there are 723,000 pages out  
there on the net with the number on them. So what to make of all  
this…”Are social networking sites doomed to failure?” asks Cognitive  
Daily. What’s your take on it?


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Thanks to Michael Dutton of IS&T’s Usability Group for this post  
idea. If you have something you’d like to see posted on our blog,  
email it to webpub at mit.edu!

See you around the 'net...

Lisa



Lisa C. Mayer
Web and Database Consultant, DCAD
Information Services and Technology (IS&T)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Room N42-240C
Cambridge, MA 02139
617-452-4225
lmayer at mit.edu


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