A story that contained a HD-DVD encryption key was submitted to Digg. After it made it to the front page, the site moderators took it down.

Another user posted the number with the title as, ‘The number.Again’. It made it to the front page in record time. That story was taken down as well. Why?

“We’ve been notified by the owners of this intellectual property that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights. In order to respect these rights and to comply with the law, we have removed postings of the key that have been brought to our attention.” (Digg Blog)

 What followed totally blew away anything that I have ever seen before. The power of the mob!

Digg was flooded with the HD-DVD stories containing the encryption key and 100 percent of the front page popular stories were on it. We all know how much Diggers hate MPAA and the RIAA and this censoring by Digg caused an uproar and a ‘revolt’. There was also a link made between HD-DVD and Kevin Rose’s Podcast, Diggnation. HD-DVD sponsors this podcast and many Diggers believe that this may be the reason Kevin caved in and moderated the stories.

Kevin Rose, usually loved by all his users has never seen this side of them. He is trying to win back the mob and this is what he blogged:

Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

Yes! The encryption Key…

Here is what he had to say:

“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”

I personally feel that a number cannot be a copyright infringement. It was the key that protected the copyrights and not the copyright itself! There are so many comments on Digg that I was p*ssing myself laughing. Everyone is trying to get the number up there on digg, let it be through submiting stories, via comments and even pictures! Click here for an example.

Wow! This is what I call the 21st Century Digital Revolt. I think soon the MPAA and RIAA will realise that DRM doesn’t work anymore.