Digg revolt: Rethinking the 'wisdom of crowds'
By Richard Koman - May 3, 2007
Antony Mayfield calls it the Great Digg Revolt of 2007 and Mike Arrington says Viva la Revolution but for Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, the story of Digg's capitulation to its mob of users intent on linking to a DRM crack must be somewhat disquieting.
The events as Arrington describes them:
The Digg team deleted a story that linked to the decryption key for HD DVDs after receiving a take down demand and all hell broke loose. More stories appeared and were deleted, and users posting the stories were suspended.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.
Digg founder Kevin Rose's white flag post, though, contains some interesting subtext:
We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.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.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
The desire to avoid being shut down, of course, refers to the fact that Digg is legally obligated to respond to takedown notices under the DMCA. (This story describes the law in the Google context.) Failure to do so exposes the site to civil liability. And since the aggrieved party is the MPAA, not exactly known for being litigation-shy, the decision could hardly have too difficult.
A harder decision would have been the one to "capitulate to the mob" as Arrington says. But in Rose's spin Digg is now willing to "go down fighting" and "die trying." But exactly what principle is Digg willing to die for? The right to post the magic code? To fight against the immorality of DRM? Nonsense.
Digg is acting like a royal battallion that finds itself cut off by an agry mob of colonials. When all is lost, they grab the rebels' standard and shout, a la Arrington, "Down with the King!" In other words, this is mob rule and Digg's only legal argument once they are sued will be "it was out of our hands because our business model is based on users controlling the site."
In other words, in Digg's success is the seed of its own destruction - and it is not alone. Any truly user-driven site can careen out of control at any time. Digg realized that continuing to act within the law seriously threatened to leave the site an abandoned empty husk, that they could not have both legal protection and a business, so they opted for business over no business, albeit one with a huge, gaping chasm that will be excavated by corporate lawyers.
May 3, 2007 | Permalink | Comment | Category: NewsWatch | Subscribe to SVW
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Comments (8)
First of all: -88-C0.
Secondly, the point is not whether DRM is immoral. The point is the utter uselessness and questionably legal position of trying to copyright an encryption key. The courts have never ruled on whether an encryption key itself rises to the level of intellectual property, and if it does, then that raises a lot of questions and has numerous unintended consequences. The fact is, Digg was bending over not because the law required it but because the MPAA was pushing it around. The law does not require you to automatically comply with any DMCA request -- only those you think actually carry some weight. There is a very convincing argument to be made that an encryption key, in and of itself, is not a protectable asset under the DMCA since it is neither a copyrightable work nor is it a program designed to
'crack' protection. The Diggs revolt was indeed a perfect example of the wisdom of crowds.
Posted: May 3, 2007 10:59 AM
OK - but it puts the service provider in the position of making that determination. That's not something most companies will be comfortable with, since if they're wrong, they lose the shield of immunity.
Posted: May 3, 2007 2:49 PM
DBL - is it the wisdom of crowds? Or mob mentality?
I thought that for the wisdom of crowds to work, each participant had to be unaware of the contribution of others.
Posted: May 4, 2007 6:49 PM
David: you have pointed to a fundamental law (flaw?) in the online world...that we change the things that we seek to measure and observe. There is a similar problem in physics, Heisenberg noticed it 90 years ago in 1927...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
Posted: May 6, 2007 5:43 AM
DMCA–use it and you will lose it, Gang of Eight
May 5th, 2007 — enigmafoundry
Let’s not forget just who the Gang of Eight, comprising the AACS LA, are, as shown on the AACS LA website:
IBM,
Intel,
Microsoft,
Panasonic,
Sony,
Toshiba,
Walt Disney Co. &
Warner Bros.
The AACS LA is desperately trying to spin their clamp down on the publication of the licensing key in terms other than free speech. Of course, they will lose this, as it is a freedom of speech issue. The key is just a number, and anyway you cut it, making the publication of a number illegal is wrong. I’ll summarize some of the reasons why, and most importantly, what is to be done about this below the fold.
http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/2007/05/02/an-interesting-development-freedom-wins/
Posted: May 6, 2007 2:24 PM
Tip o' the hat to Mark Blafkin for providing the historical reference I was bumbling around in this piece (although he might check the bylines a little closer:-)) . Here's how he put it and I wish I had:
Robespierre... supposedly leapt from his chair as soon as he saw a mob assembling outside and said "I must see which way the crowd is headed,for I am their leader."
I think this is true too: "When your value is based on the people you attract more than the value of any product or service you provide, your grasp on success is tenuous at best. You will always be at the mercy of 5-10 percent of your users that are most active and usually most crazy."
Posted: May 6, 2007 2:43 PM
The Digg revolt is a triumphant example of real democracy in action. Obviously the corporate sector doesn't like it because they are, by their very nature, totalitarian.
Power to the people!
Posted: May 6, 2007 3:04 PM
Now if there was someway to incorporate this on issues such as Big Pharma & Big Oil.
Posted: June 8, 2007 11:43 AM