Digg, AACS, and the question of online communities

Digg in tough spot with DMCA debacle

But the story was different at Digg. Its user base, notoriously opinionated and used to a community-run atmosphere with very little editorial control, revolted. "The Digg community is one that loves to have their voice heard, and this has been something that struck a chord with them," Rose said.

Members rebelled against what they saw as unnecessary censorship, flooding the site with submissions and comments containing the cracked key to the point where not a single one of Digg's top-ranked technology stories didn't pertain to the issue. And it reached beyond Digg, too. The HD DVD key made appearances in numerous blog and forum posts, Twitter messages and Photoshopped images all over the Internet.

In a blog post Tuesday night, Rose bowed to his site's readers. "After seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear," he wrote. "You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company...effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be." Rose even stressed his solidarity with the membership by posting the key in the title of his post.

I think John Cass put it very well in yesterday's comments:

Suspend the account of the people who post the stories. Digg could be sued, and the people who Digg bomb are not thinking about what could happen to Digg. It shows a lack of consideration on the people who bombed Digg. If people don't like what AACS is doing they can build their own site and get sued by AACS. People should respect the rules of website they are posting on. I delete posts all the time because people spam me with sales messages, and will even ban people if they persist.

If we don't want to live in a society goverened by online bullies we need to shut down this sort of thing.

Edit -
Fred von Lohmann of EEF has a good essay on the law at issue here.

Edit ii-
John Cass has second thoughts.