Class Discussion: Digg Founder Digs Himself a Grave

"If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying." - The defiant words of the founder of Digg.com, the community-based news website that allows users to dictate which stories are the most significant and hence get the most exposure. The website incorporates ideas from Slashdot, MySpace, and blogging and has revolutionized the way we view news on the web. The site is now responsible for roughly 1% of the total US Internet traffic . Unfortunately, the website's lack of censorship, the platform the company was founded on, has got them into a great deal of legal trouble. After posting articles and blogs that described a software crack that breaks the encryption on HD-DVDs, a legal battle has been mounted by the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator to effectively gag the bloggers and the Digg website to prevent further dissemination of this sensitive information. Digg has decided it will not back down and has put it all on the line to support its users' struggle to preserve their right to publish content freely. This revolt, so to speak, more broadly represents the online community's unwillingness to give in to the demands of corporations and regulatory bodies, and their determination to assert themselves in this new era of Web 2.0. This also raises issues regarding the levels of censorship that should be permitted to govern user-generated content over the web. This is quite an important and timely issue, and it will be interesting to see both how the legal battle unfolds as well as the repercussions it will have on the blogging community.