It was an insane day on Digg. The front page on Digg has been completely taken over by posts regarding the code to break the restrictive protection of HD-DVD. Every post! It’s an act of defiance by the people of Digg against the restrictions placed by industry interest groups. It’s also a representation of democracy on the internet. Power to the people!

There is apparently more story to this. As can be seen from the following public letter by Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, Digg received warnings from lawyers to remove the posts. But, Rose has decided to go down fighting.

The founders of Digg did something I feel totally worth blogging about today. I feel proud to belong to the community on Digg.

by Kevin Rose at 9pm, May 1st, 2007 in Digg Website
Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. 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.

Digg on,

Kevin

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