There is apparently a huge uproar at Digg about the submission of the HD DVD hex key. The hex key itself was actually revealed quite a bit earlier back in February. It was then posted to Digg recently and Digg deleted the article on basis of a lawsuit from MPAA.

Afterwards, they started banning the users as well as their ips when some of the users started to re-register. Then, numerous users began (it's almost like an online riot) to flood the Digg frontpage with submission after submission of the HD-DVD hex key.

Users accuse Digg of having no backbone (they think Digg might have won the lawsuit had they decided to at least try; after all, Digg should not be responsible for the content that's submitted by users) and many of them are fleeing to other sites.

So what do you guys think of this? Do you think Digg was in the right in banning so as to avoid a lawsuit or should they stick up for its community of users (it is, after all, a "user-based community"!)?

There are also numerous users out there who think that Digg shouldn't have banned users. They believe Digg could've just deleted articles, but there's no point in banning users. And moreover, most other sites (say Slashdot or Reddit or Wired) haven't caved in to MPAA.

There's also arguments about whether the HD-DVD hex key can really be considered copyrighted. It seems just like a string of numbers, after all.

So, your opinions?

Source: http://www.techpwn.com/?p=419

 

 

 

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Kevin Rose posted a reply for all to see "We hear you" he emphatically stated.
The owners of Digg watched as a revolt took place. I even saw a song that was written in Spanish that declared the HD DVD hex key as words in the song!!! Servers were going crazy-----I believe even Digg may have experienced a meltdown. In any event, Kevin Rose stated to its readers that they are not going to delete any more submissions containing the key-----come what may.

I see this as being a part or glimpse of a bigger picture. The bigger picture is that we in the US are having our freedoms slowly eroded and taken away. Case in point, a military man in Washington DC got a $500 ticket for driving in the Carpool lane, with not the required number of people in the car. $50 maybe, but $500-----really now. Isn't that highway robbery? (Pun intended!)

 

 

 

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Well come on, if the same user is posting the same thing over and over (and it IS illegal), there is a pretty limited number of tools you can use.



The key is not copyrighted in itself, making it public is illegal as doing so serves no other goal but disabling the encryption of the original media (which is, in the light of law and the license you agreed to obtaining the media, illegal).

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And at the same time, the very people they are banning are the same people who make up their userbase. If they lose their userbase, then they lose the whole point of their business. Besides, people didn't start posting things over and over again until they banned that one user. Nothing would've gotten so big if that hadn't happened.

That makes to sense. If the key isn't copyrighted, then there's no reason why it cannot be made public. Sure, it serves a bad purpose, but then I could just as well argue that teaching people how to pick locks could very well serve a bad purpose and shouldn't be published either. This is a matter of free speech: the key isn't copyrighted, just like words aren't copyrighted, and so reproducing them shouldn't be illegal.

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