May 2, 2007 Comments
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Picture this. Your four year old and several of their little friends are having a play date. One of them finds a set of matches. They start to play with the matches and you notice. You immediately take the matches away. Suddenly, all of the kids start to scream at the top of their lungs. They drown out all other sound and they're giving you a pounding headache. What do you do? Well, if you're Kevin Rose you apparently give the matches back to them and put the fire department on speed dial.
While I'm a fan of social media, I've also let it be known that I generally view Digg with skepticism. It has it's place, but sites run by consensus (and especially by the consensus of young, male college students) tend to shift from idealistic democracy to anarchy and fascism fairly quickly. Yesterday, we had a chance to see that in action.
Yesterday morning, the staff at Digg posted a notice to let users know that they were removing certain posts that were breaking intellectual property laws.
I just wanted to explain what some of you have been noticing around some stories that have been submitted to Digg on the HD DVD encryption key being cracked.
This has all come up in the past 24 hours, mostly connected to the HD-DVD hack that has been circulating online, having been posted to Digg as well as numerous other popular news and information websites. 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.
Seems like a pretty logical response to me. After all, the site hosting the illegal content is going to be the one that pays the price. Digg can hardly continue to operate if they're shut down by lawsuits.
The problem? Well, apparently many within the Digg community have decided that they are above such silly things as "the law" and they decided that the best way to respond was to act a quarter of their age. Basically, they collectively decided that if they couldn't have their story, no one else could have theirs either.
And such, this quickly became the front page of Digg.
Yep, you saw that right. The Digg community decided that until they got their way, they were going to block every story except for the HD-DVD one.
What's that they say? A person is smart but people are stupid.
Talk about a bastion of maturity.
On the other hand, it worked. Digg founder Kevin Rose made a post last night "giving in" to the demands of the community.
...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.
Hmm...the problem with being a martyr is that you're dead. You can no longer continue to actively impact the world.
Jennifer Laycock is the Editor of Search Engine Guide, an educational web site aimed at translating the search marketing world into something that small business owners can understand. Jennifer specializes in common sense search engine marketing, viral marketing and customer outreach via social media and blogs. A former search marketing consultant and in-house trainer, Jennifer’s clients have included companies like Verizon, American Greetings and Highlights for Children. Her primary clients now are a little girl named Elnora and a little boy named Emmitt.
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