I have been a pretty active digg’r for a while now. Yesterday was a turning point in the evolution of the digg. It seems that there was a digg link to a story regarding the secret key for the encryption on HD-DVD. From what has been talked about there was a ‘please take it down’ letter from someone. Obviously trying to use their clout to force the suppression of this information.

According to Techcrunch

“That just got the Digg community fired up, and soon the entire Digg home page was filled with stories containing the decryption key. The users had taken control of the site, and unless Digg went into wholesale deletion mode and suspended a large portion of their users, there was absolutely nothing they could do to stop it.” -Techcrunch

So what do you do? Digg has basically gone to the crowd. When you create an open system that is mostly unmoderated you have to be open to the fact that at some point the crowd can take over. How do you handle this is the key. I think this is where companies like Digg are different then other companies. I think if this was an old school minded company they would be bowing under the pressure … Digg however …responds with honesty

“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.”-Kevin Rose

What find really funny is how these things turn on the companies that want to hide this info. Did the company that sent the cease and desist letter really think that sending a letter was going to hide this code ? I bet that if they would have left it alone the story would have been up on the popular page for a few hours a few thousand people would look at it and it would settle into the digg dust. But now by making a big deal about it they have made this front page news on some of the major blogs. Now instead of glancing over that story I have now learned about the security of HD-DVD’s and I now know how to exploit this seemingly feeble security. So there now you have educated more people, more potential pirates. This story went from the hacking community to the entire community….unexpected effect I am sure.

What can be learned from this?

Community is stronger then a letter …. even if it is a C&D letter. - You can’t kill the community. Try and the voice just gets louder. When Digg started to kill stories, users started to use the code in comments, story bodies and titles. Here is a story that I ran across yesterday ….

Sometimes it is better to let things die on their own. - The net has a surprisingly short memory. I think that by ignoring the story the effect would have been much less. Let the story go thru the life cycle. Dugg, Popular , Digg Dust. Don’t try to play with that life cycle and make it go away. Now this story made it to TechCrunch. Now more people know then ever would have on Digg, way to go ! (an obvious move by a lawyer that doesn’t understand the social web.

Roll with your users - I mean really what could digg do? I think their response was adequate and the that there was really nothing that was going to stop this from getting out there. I liked Kevin Rose’s response …

Well this story is obviously going to evolve more in the coming days. As for me …. I am off to buy a HD-DVD player ….. those things are hackable you know!

cheers

Scott

UPDATE to this story:

BBC is now covering this ….i guess that cease and desist looks pretty silly now. If this had been left alone ….digg dust.

John Dvorak cites :

First of all, nobody, myself included, knows what to do with the code. It is practically useless.

If the lawyers did nothing, it would have languished as a curiosity with perhaps a few crackers developing some software with it. The end result would be a few cracked copies of DVDs running on a few computers here and there.

Because of the lawyers and the nasty letters, now everyone online knows how important this number must be. Boom! Now users get to work on it.

Heck of a job, lawyers.

Investors should be aware of the overall dangers the legal profession present to companies, and how its current and generalized naiveté can sink fortunes overnight. While I know of no corporation that has been bankrupted by this sort of fiasco, it will happen eventually if lawyers doesn’t catch up with the times.

Or perhaps some executives should think for themselves

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