May 2, 2007 2:46 PM PDT
Digg in tough spot with DMCA debacle
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In a blog post Tuesday afternoon, Digg CEO Jay Adelson wrote that the company was pulling down a number of news stories pertaining to a cracked HD DVD encryption key that could circumvent the digital rights management (DRM) restrictions on the media discs.
The reason, he said, was a cease-and-desist letter on behalf of the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), the consortium with ownership rights to the key that had been cracked. The organization cited Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which concerns the spread of information pertaining to DRM breaking. By including stories that linked to the key, the letter argued, Digg was breaking the law.
AACS representatives did not return requests for comment.
At first, there was no indication that pulling the stories would turn into the brouhaha it became. Digg, after all, is no stranger to cease-and-desist letters. "We've received a lot of notices in the past from all different companies," Digg founder Kevin Rose said in a telephone interview Wednesday with CNET News.com. The site has pulled stories related to everything from piracy to pornography to hate speech. "We receive anywhere from seven (thousand) to 10,000 new stories a day, so there's always something that pops up every couple of weeks," Rose said.
Additionally, Digg was not the sole target of the letter, Rose said. "A bunch of different sites have been getting these takedown notices," he said. The Web site Chilling Effects, for example, posted a copy of the same letter, which was also sent to Google concerning appearances of the key on blogs hosted on Google's Blogger platform.
The Conde Nast-owned Reddit, a direct competitor to Digg, also received the cease-and-desist letter last week. "At the time, we complied with the takedown," said Kourosh Kharimkhany, general manager of Wired Digital, the Conde Nast division that operates Reddit. "An argument could be made that the number was still obscure (at that point) and that the secret could still be protected. In other words, they made a reasonable request, so we complied."
Kharimkhany confirmed that Reddit is no longer blocking story submissions or comments because he believes it's unreasonable for the AACS to try to keep the lid on it. "There's something like 56,000 search results on Google (for the key), so their secret is definitely out." The controversy appears to have left Reddit unscathed.
But the story was different at Digg. Its user base, notoriously opinionated and used to a community-run atmosphere with very little editorial control, revolted. "The Digg community is one that loves to have their voice heard, and this has been something that struck a chord with them," Rose said.
Members rebelled against what they saw as unnecessary censorship, flooding the site with submissions and comments containing the cracked key to the point where not a single one of Digg's top-ranked technology stories didn't pertain to the issue. And it reached beyond Digg, too. The HD DVD key made appearances in numerous blog and forum posts, Twitter messages and Photoshopped images all over the Internet.
In a blog post Tuesday night, Rose bowed to his site's readers. "After seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear," he wrote. "You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company...effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be." Rose even stressed his solidarity with the membership by posting the key in the title of his post.
See more CNET content tagged:
Digg,
Reddit,
DMCA,
HD-DVD,
letter
Full story at: http://allsux.com
http://www.realtime-websecurity.com/articles_and_analysis/2007/05/the_digg_meltdown_censorship_a.html
for more on that line of thought.
PS: Since when did that small a string of numbers become copyrighted, anyway?
/P
Copyright violations on community driven sites has become the norm. Users love to get censored or free information and the site owners thrive on circulating such information. This is no surprise.
Popularity of a site as of today, is based on numbers, no longer on quality. No wonder even sites like BBC and presidential candidates are forced to go to YouTube.
Eventually 2600 magazine published the crack, and then got hit with a lawsuit to remove it and remove all links to it and 2600 had displayed a text file with URLs to places on the Internet that the code could be found, using a loophole around the law as users could copy and paste those URLs in their web browsers.
I think the 2600 case will be used as a reference for the HD-DVD case, because both had the decryption code posted on the Internet.
The DMCA is unfair because there is no "fair use" clause that allows a person or organization to use copyrighted material for paradoy, education, or non-profit use like the old copyright act had in it. Our founding fathers must be turning over in their graves if they knew just how the MPAA has taken away the rights and freedoms of the US citizens with the DMCA and the government working with the MPAA and RIAA to take away rights and freedoms from the citizens.
The Genie was let out of the bottle, but now it cannot be put back into the bottle.
Haven't the MPAA and RIAA learned yet that for every DRM system they invent that takes away rights and freedoms that someone somewhere will find a way to break it?
The alternative is to offer DRM-less media at lower prices, so there is less need to pirate it in the first place. Prices are high in the first place because they added on the R&D costs of creating the DRM technology.
For the 131 people that bought HD-DVD players, you may want to stop buying disks for it and buy a Blue-Ray player.
BTW - The DMCA and anybody that uses it is no different than the KGB.