Written By Kate Zimmermann | May 2, 2007 | Share This |

Not since LOST has a string of numbers held such seeming importance - a 32 character code used to remove copy protection on HD-DVDs was posted yesterday on Digg, censored, and re-posted in what became a massive user protest. The battle between Digg users (protesting code censorship) and Digg moderators (censoring to avoid lawsuit) shutdown the site and finally culminated in a secession by the Digg moderators. SMO Blog has the best rendition of this May Day Saga that “almost killed Digg.”

It all seems overly dramatic to me, but it brings up interesting issues regarding DMCA laws and control in social media. This isn’t the first show of power by a social media community - Facebookers got all riled up over Facebook’s news feed, and Wikipedia got into trouble when they started using rel=no_follow tags. But this is the first instance of a user protest that might actually lead to the termination of the site. As Graywolf writes,

“While the Diggers may be congratulating themselves on a hard fought victory, it will be short lived. Basically they set their own homes on fire and burned them to ground to prove the point they were in charge. When the “suits” come in I fully expect there to be some changes and the power and freedom the users had will start to be throttled back.”

Search Engine Land, on the other hand, thinks the DMCA enforcement doesn’t hold ground,

“Publishing instructions rather than actual devices does not seem to be a violation of this particular part of the DMCA, to my non-legal but common sense eyes. Frankly, the AACS seems to be stretching those provisions to suggest that simply writing about how to override copyright protection is a violation of the DMCA, one that might require information to be taken off the web.”

Follow the developing story/opinion stream on Techmeme.

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