Within the past day, the popular website Digg.com has come under scrutiny for removing link articles containing the HD DVD encryption key and cracking information. Many users have said this infringes upon the entirely democratic website that Digg.com promised them, however this is covered under the Digg.com Terms of Service when the user registered — meaning Digg.com has the ability to remove these stories at their discretion. However, Digg.com has also removed accounts related toward those stories and comments posted about the HD DVD encryption key being cracked.
As you all know, HD DVD is the format currently competing with BluRay over the next hard media format for your films, games and easily portable storage. Digg, explains their position thusly:
Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law. Digg’s Terms of Use, and the terms of use of most popular sites, are required by law to include policies against the infringement of intellectual property. This helps protect Digg from claims of infringement and being shut down due to the posting of infringing material by others.
Our goal is always to maintain a purely democratic system for the submission and sharing of information – and we want Digg to continue to be a great resource for finding the best content. However, in order for that to happen, we all need to work together to protect Digg from exposure to lawsuits that could very quickly shut us down.
Now, this is all well and good. However, this “fear of lawsuits” card has been played over and over again by companies who now need to make payroll after being all loosey goosey for years during their indie days. Clearly Digg headquarters just bought a Tassimo coffee maker and a new conference table and, as a result, doesn’t want to lose its lease.
Also, it should be noted that Digg’s parent company has signed a lucrative sponsorship arrangement with HD-DVD. There is a business conflict of interest here that motivated Digg to proactively respond to this issue in a fashion that is much harsher and less open than the way Google responds to such take down notices. This is a story of behind the scenes corporate interests dictating behavior.
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Well they’ve lost alot active users..
Dont get me wrong they probably wont leave but they will harbour resentment to digg for a long time, and worse they’ll miss-use digg and/or abuse it when possible..
I know i will
Digg never removed outright stories about scientology (even though they are very litigious) nor blatantly racist stories (and there have been a lot.)
This is a lesson that Digg can be bought, you just need to buy a lot of advertising with Digg’s parent company. In a way, it isn’t that different from major newspapers who are loath to run stories that are critical of their major advertisers. It is a story of corruption and media censorship by big business.
Do you think HD-DVD knew what they were doing when they got themselves into a major relationship with Digg that gave HD-DVD a lot of leverage.
There I did it!!! I feel better now :)
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Digg’s actually auto-deleting a lot of the stories that have that stupid number or HD-DVD in the title. I was messing around with submitting stories about the fiasco linking to my blog (yes, I’m guilty of trying to take advantage of the mob rule ;) and noticed that several of my stories completely disappeared. While I think that it sucks that the digg homepage is being flooded with shit stories, I think trying to censor further is just going to keep adding fuel to the fire.
Nick
http://www.adgridwork.com | free online advertising for bloggers
Nick, I don’t think they are actively deleting stories anymore. By the looks of things their servers are melting down. A big site like Digg can’t rely on a single server, so they put all of the information on multiple servers. Usually, when you contribute to the site (digg, comment, bury etc) the other servers would get notified instantly. But the servers just can’t keep up with it. So by the time you refresh the page you may be on a different server, a server that hasn’t become aware of your submissions.
The same has happened to me with comments. They seem to just disappear, but a few refreshes later and they are there again.
why delete? it’s all ready out?
isn’t just making it wore? i’m not sure i understand…..
doesn’t deleting over and over just piss those people posting off?
oh well i guess.
Let´s Make some History
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_www_war
DRM is evil. RIAA is evil. MPAA is evil.
Hooray for the Universal Content Utopia.
Digg is funded by HD DVD. Digg is … done.
Their servers are NOT melting down.
Digg is busy deleting accounts of passionate users who question their policies, and this is typical of Digg, according to numerous accounts.
Blue-ray won the race, who cares about the keys to a soon-to-be obsolete technology. Maybe this is all a marketing ploy to get a few more headlines before this technology joins the trash heep along with all those Zunes! ;-)
Jon
My site’s frontpage also looked like Digg’s yesterday because everyone, from Slashdot, Reddit, Delicious, or Digg, was talking about the HD-DVD crack. If you didn’t know about the crack before, you do now. I am not sure the HD-DVD consortium knew what they were getting themselves into when they sent that cease and desist letter…-Metagg
Metagg – you got to admit this was a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” type situation, there wasn’t any good way out of it. Now the worst kept secret on the net is out to the masses, though I bet 99.999% of the people out there have no clue what to even do with this knowledge.
Jon
Trash heep? Is that Uriah Heep’s second cousin? Tsk.
wow :)
its very interesting article.
Good post.
realy gj
thx :-)