I am, frankly, on the side of the HD-DVD consortium on this. I am a firm believer in copyright protection and have refused numerous times to accept illegal copies of expensive software. Yeah, I’d like to have the software. But I grew up a while back, and realized that it’s wrong to steal. There’s a big difference between fair use (for example, using music clips in my podcast) and outright theft.
Michael Malone has a great article on the Diggers trying to subvert copyright law.
But the biggest problem with Digg is not the business itself, which is an impressive creation, but its community. One of the things we’re learning about the Web 2.0 world is that all communities aren’t alike; when you let millions of anonymous users design your product, you also let them determine your fate. And Digg has put itself in the hands of an army of postadolescents with too much education and too much free time, the age cohort that gets its news from “The Colbert Report” and holds the anarchistic view that all information should be, in fact, “wants to be,” free.
Nothing wrong with that. Indeed, been there, done that. But now, in my gray-haired middle-age I’ve come to realize that if you are going to create a venue for children to play, someone has to be the grown-up. And that is where Digg blew it.
[...] In other words, Digg was willing to block porn and hate sites, but was perfectly willing to violate trade secrets if its users said so.
It was a breathtaking abrogation of responsibility by a person in a position of authority. If you sign up to be sheriff, and are rewarded handsomely for doing so, then your job when the howling mob shows up outside the jail is defend the prisoner under attack, even if you despise him. At the very least, you run away and accept the shame of your cowardice. But the one thing you don’t ever do is join the mob knocking down the jailhouse door.
And that is exactly what Kevin Rose did. Rather than maturely endure the momentary anger of his community, he instead caved in the most craven manner possible. With a certain justice, all that this gutless move managed to do was earn Rose even more contempt for being two-faced and spineless.
Read it all.
Update: Background on the Digg revolution that the article above misses.
While it’s obvious why the creator of a movie or a song might deserve some special claim over the use of their creation, it’s hard to see why anyone should be able to pick a number at random and unilaterally declare ownership of it. There is nothing creative about this number — indeed, it was chosen by a method designed to ensure that the resulting number was in no way special. It’s just a number they picked out of a hat. And now they own it?
As if that’s not weird enough, there are actually millions of other numbers (other keys used in AACS) that AACS LA claims to own, and we don’t know what they are. When I wrote the thirty-digit number that appears above, I carefully avoided writing the real 09F9 number, so as to avoid the possibility of mind-bending lawsuits over integer ownership. But there is still a nonzero probability that AACS LA thinks it owns the number I wrote.