Just musing about the recent brouhaha over at digg. TwiT’s latest podcast is a must-listen for those following the Digg story. The podcast feature a recorded interview with Kevin Rose on the whole Digg debacle. To make a long story short, digg users were pissed off that Digg did a takedown of a digg featuring a hex string of numbers purported to be an AACS (Advanced Access Content System) key used to secure blu-ray/HD-DVD discs – a sort of copy protection.
Phew, that was a mouthful.
Besides the question of the legality of posting that key, the more interesting question is how, in my opinion, Digg caved in to their users’ demands to revoke the said takedown. That’s when the shit hit the fan, of course: people started creating new accounts and posting the said key over and over again, leading to a slew of bans and such.
Kevin’s reasons for putting that banned post back up was simple: digg is a site built up by the community, and therefore digg should stand up for the community and what the community believes in. Leo clarified that digg didn’t receive a takedown notice but a demand letter – the differences are beyond me, not being a lawyer.
What I found interesting was digg’s reaction. Digg is like the poster “site†for web 2.0: social networking and community driven content. Kevin’s reasons were telling: to support its community above and beyond considerations of whether digg might be legally liable for displaying that AACS key.
If anything, it’s a classic example of succumbing to the mob. But what sort of mob? Is it really a children’s crusade, as Leo puts it? Who knows. I think we’ve seen quite a number of content aggregation sites pop up in the past two or three years, aggregating content provided by users for the benefit of other users.
The user base of these various sites are relatively small, in the larger scheme of internet users: about two million digg users out of tens of millions of users in America, for example. There is a tendency I’ve noticed of these sites becoming little islands of interactivity strangely cut off from the rest of the world.
These little islands/online communities form rules of their own, self-regulate and are essentially online “nations†with users coming from different communities which have different rules in regulating real-life interactions – or even online interactions.
When will the idea of official “citizenship†in massive online communities catch on, I’m wondering, with enforceable rules that supersede the laws of the communities from which individuals come from. Wouldn’t that be an interesting idea, if applied to Malaysia?
In any case, the funny thing about Digg capitulating to users’ demands, of course, is the fact that the Digg community isn’t the one taking all the risks, here. Sure, the community appears to feel a certain way about the DMCA, DRM and such. But the ones facing the real-life predicament of evading a possible lawsuit is a site that essentially receives no fees or monies from the community. It’ll be interesting to see if digg users really come out of the woodwork and start supporting digg substantially if and when a lawsuit comes a-knocking.