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ZOMG! Infringing lawsuit bait content deleted from Digg!

Found on TechMeme, the story of how posting the HD-DVD content encryption key in a hexidecimal string is getting stories deleted, users banned, and the digg community up in arms.

At issue is the fact that many seem to feel that it is censorship to delete stories about a number that will get Digg into hot legal water. Muhammad Saleem - a rare beacon of intelligence on the issue - outlines the DMCA clauses that have prompted Digg’s entirely justified actions. Does Digg want to get sued out of existence? No. Why does this surprise Digg’s user base? Apparently that user base expects digg to committ legal seppuku on the HD-DVD format body’s legal altar to prove a point about how information wants to be free.

DownloadSquad has the most hyperbolic coverage, comparing the issue to Martin Luther’s XX theses, and treating it as some sort of tipping point in the consumers vs. producers battle.

Let’s tell it like it is: a flash-in-the-pan nerdgasm about a hex string is not an internet revolution - its a great way for a devoted niche group of Linux users to geek out and have some fun. Good for them. Its also conceiveably a major lawsuit vector against Digg, and the users that posted it: its infringement people, and the letter of the law is on the side of HD-DVD. Good for digg for taking it down. All the righteous posturing in the world doesn’t change the situation and the correctness of digg’s actions.

EDIT: Can someone comment intelligently on the “infringement” aspects here? How does this compare to the DVD/CSS situation? Or ripped CD’s?

digg, dmca, hddvd, hexidecimal seppuku

5 Responses to “ZOMG! Infringing lawsuit bait content deleted from Digg!”

Ilya Lichtenstein | May 1st, 2007 at 7:36 pm

You might be the only tech blogger I’ve seen who’s actually siding WITH Digg and the MPAA on this. It’s nice to see a diversity of opinion, but you don’t have the whole picture.

The issue here is the excesses of the MPAA/RIAA in attacking everything they perceive as piracy. The issue is also that it is completely ludicrous to outlaw a NUMBER. Not an illegal copy of a movie or an MP3, not a piracy site, but a number. Numerous DMCA notices and threats have been sent to every site even mentioning the number. What if they picked the decryption key to be ‘3′? Would you consider it equally justified for them to sue every site with the number 3?

And please don’t claim Digg had no choice. Digg has been known for repeated censorship, to the point that stories simply criticizing Digg for censorship are getting deleted.

Rival tech voting site reddit, meanwhile, has not taken any action to censor the number- and a story which has the infringing number in its title is still on the homepage: http://programming.reddit.com/info/1mb4f/comments
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