Thursday 3 May 2007

Digg in the illegality ?

The last guest in class spoke briefly about Digg, a website (a 2.0website becoming incontrovertible) enabling to share your favorites pages with everybody.
At the beginning of the story, there is an article digged containing a decoding key to copy any HD movie (this key had been changed since last week :)). In few hours, the article became famous, referenced by more than 16,000 internet users. What made this article n° 1 on Digg, appearing in first on the website.

Immediatly, the AACS LA (the compagny owner of the technology and of the key) required (through a letter do digg) the deleting of the link to the article. And Digg obey, saying through there blog "However, in order for that to happen, we all need to work together to protect Digg from exposure to lawsuits that could very quickly shut us down."

But the community didn't agre. Few minutes after the deleting, the article reappeared, and is deleted again. A hide-and-seek game starts, the names of articles changes, subjects too, but the key is still in them.
Seeing that the party is lost (after hours, the 10 "best" articles containing the key), Kevin Rose founder of Digg lined up with the community and took a very courageous position: "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."
The title of the message being
"Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0" (guess what? it's the famous key, but too late to use it :()

Digg is now running a risk being illegal. The US law about copyright saying that the diffusion of any code or key allowing the bypass of technologic mesures is forbidden.
Hollywood has not respond yet to it.
But how many websites are illegal? mininova.org offering torrents for few years now (after the closing of meganova.org). If Digg closes, another website will emerge, with the same values (sharing not pirating). On Internet, communities can be dissolved and 2 days after they will appear again, stronger (in number and more populare).
I love it :D

1 comment:

Lan said...

Too bad, too late for me :)
Nice postings! I like the discussion of internet and some concurrent issues like the Virginia shooting, French election, etc.

Nice to have you in the class. Have a nice summer!