For eight hours on Tuesday, May 1st, Digg, the popular social news aggregator site, was flooded with posts containing an encryption key that could be used to crack copy protection on HD DVDs. The reason for the digital user revolt was that word had spread in the community that Digg's moderators had removed entries pointing to articles that contained the copyrighted code following threats of legal action by the AACSLA, the consortium that owns the copyright to the technology that includes the code. Whereas users saw the removal of the content as a form of censorship and suppression of free speech, AACSLA claimed that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act it is illegal to publish instructions on how to circumvent access control - often referred to as Digital Rights Management (DRM) - on copyrighted material.
Following legal advice, Digg started to remove content containing the 47 digit long encryption key only to find the problem turning into a multi-headed serpent. Every time an entry had been removed and the submitting user banned from the site, users in their thousands were re-submitting the code - eventually threatening the site to fail under the impact of the revolt. The user revolt also spread to other websites working on user created content, like Wikipedia.
Eventually, Kevin Rose, one of the founders of Digg, published a statement on the site saying that stories wouldn't be removed from the site any longer. Referring to the democratic nature of the site, he said:
"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."
In what could be seen as an attempt to win the sympathy of the Digg community back, Rose actually included the key that had caused the controversy in the title to his statement. At least the strategy had worked in one respect: the articles containing the encryption key no longer dominate the Digg homepage.
The community-based site that combines social bookmarking, blogging and syndication is seen as one of the prime examples of Web 2.0. It was founded as an experiment in 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky and Jay Adelson, and has over a million registered users to date. The Digg homepage works on a system of user-voted content, where stories that receive the highest number of 'Diggs' get promoted to the top.
Digg now faces a lawsuit by the AACSLA that could lead to the social-bookmarking website being shut down. Other companies, like Google and Wikipedia, had previously followed orders by the AACSLA to remove content referring to the controversial encryption key.
Although Digg's terms of use clearly state that it is against the site's rules to violate copyright laws, many users apparently don't believe that circumventing DRM technology automatically leads to protected content being duplicated. It seems that Digg might fall victim to the problem of whether circumventing copyright control technology is really illegal - a controversy that is, in effect, much older than the website itself.
