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Millisock re-registered at digg and posted a story about speech freedom, about the users choice to publish whatever he wishes. "If the majority decides something is true, then it's the truth," says Millisock. Thousands of digg users agreed with him and started commenting on this matter.
This incident caused problems to digg team. The idea of digg is that everyone who can use internet is able to post articles at digg and the other users of it may comment on the articles and rate them. The most rated articles will appear on the homepage of digg. So the website is free for public, everyone can post there, and banning a user for a secret code is not fair to the user.
On the other side, digg's lawyers advise not to publish these kinds of codes, because DVD companies can make troubles for digg because of illegal free downloading. But here is what Digg CEO Jay Adelson said: "Not only are we aligned with our users in this, but we cannot suppress such a voice. The people have the power in this new medium."
The huge amount of comments on this matter made a dilemma for digg: let the users post whatever they want or ban the users who post illegal information.
This is a quite usual situation for user-oriented websites, because users usually ignore the terms of use. Despite the terms clearly mention that posting of copyrighted information is not allowed, users keep doing it and cause the website owners troubles. Google's YouTube have been in such a situation when it was sued by Viacom.
Anyway, digg decided to ignore its lawyer's advices and chose the user's side.
Site founder and chief architect Kevin Rose said that digg staff would allow the stories to post and deal with whatever legal ramifications would follow. "If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying," wrote Rose.
Digg is mostly depends on its users so it can't ignore user's voice. Digg has 15 million unique users a month and only 18 employees, so the employees can't stand such a pressure of huge amount of users. May be this is why digg decided to allow users keep publishing. The only thing digg doesn't allow is pornography.
So if there is something that digg users want to do, they can do it.
By Ruzan Harutyunyan for HULIQ.com
Posted May 3rd, 2007 by ruzik_tuzik
There are many phrases that can describe what the code can do: “decryptâ€, “hackâ€, “remove copy protection†HD-DVDs…. All these actions are illegal in my opinion, so to hack a copyrighted DVD is illegal. I think that many publishers and DVD producers will agree with me.
About the quote: it is taken from Business Week news.
Thanks for your comment.
NOT TRUE
Many things in this article are not true.
The code does NOT enable users to download free high definition DVDs illegally.
And the quote "If the majority decides something is true, then it's the truth," is a misquote. I never said that. I believe that letting the majority decide what is news is a better solution that letting one person or a few people have control over it.
Sheesh.