In Digg Nation - The Number Game
Digg fall down and go boom.
by Gerard Van der Leun, PJM Seattle
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It was the number that launched 24,552 31,523 Diggs — most of those Diggs were directed at Digg itself. It was also a number that launched thousands of copies of itself across the Internet. What is this number? It’s a secret… or rather was a secret. It is also a “copyrighted” number that has now been “copylefted” or “copylifted” depending on your point of view. It is a number that unlocks copy protection on HD-DVDs. To the movie industry it is a number worth untold millions of dollars if people don’t know it, and one that could cost the industry untold millions of dollars if people do know it. Which they do. Now. In the millions.
Google probably won’t tell you the number. They’ve received a “cease and desist” order from the owners of the number. But Digg can tell you even though for a bit yesterday they decided they couldn’t and began to delete every page and posting on Digg that contained the number. That was the policy then:
“We’ve been notified by the owners of this intellectual property that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights. In order to respect these rights and to comply with the law, we have removed postings of the key that have been brought to our attention.”
But live by the users, die by the users. Digg, a site whose content is created by over a million users, quickly became the focus of the Digg users who believe, in the core of their being, that “Information wants to be free.” They instantly reacted to the “policy” by flooding Digg with thousands of postings containing the number, together with cross-postings to blogs and forums by thousands. Flowing right behind this first wave was a tsunami of rage directed at Digg itself. By the mornings light, Digg founders had “heard the users” and changed course 180 degrees. In a pure Hail Mary play they decided to go all in on the side of the users:
“We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code,” according to the posting. “…You’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.”
Digg may indeed die from this decision since the large media companies like to make examples of people and companies that thwart their will — although it usually doesn’t involve companies that can ship bits by the tanker load like Digg and the online behemoth Google. Still, once the lawyers start their billing clocks the only limit is the depth of pockets on all sides of the argument. Digg seems to feel that it has to placate the users who “made it clear.”
But just who is the you that “has made it clear?” Charles Johnson calls it bowing to the mob, ” a virtual lynch mob,” and he has reason to know about the Digg mob. Allah at Hot Air pronounced it a riot as in “laff riot.” The action has created one of the largest Blogpiles even seen on Techmeme as hundreds of blogs weighed in. Other sites and voices call what happened “an example of 21st century digital revolt.” But is it?
Not at all. One of the constants of the Internet since the Stone Ages when hypertext standards were but a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee eye, is the conflict between the “Information wants to be free” crowd and the “Yes, but people need to get paid” set has been a staple on the Net. (Think “Discussions about what ‘fair use’ really means.”)
Both then and now the nature of the living Web is that everything scrolls off. Because of this, everything is repeated.
An Internet Stone Age parallel to today’s “sekrit” number kerfuffle was first seen on a massive scale in the “Scientology versus the Internet” Usenet wars of the early 1990s. In this long running flare up, the publication of “secret internal documents of the ‘Church’ of Scientology” were promulgated across the internet via the Usenet group alt.religion.scientology by one Dennis Erlich, a disaffected one-time high ranking member of Scientology.
Because the posting of these documents placed Scientology in an unfavorable light and revealed “trade secrets,” the group moved to expunge the both documents and the newsgroup. Scientology used a host of methods, legal and spam based, to try and stop these documents from being available at all. But the ubergeeks of the newsgroups answered them with mirror sites, document files held on servers in foreign countries, and a “make my day” attitude. The result was that many millions more people grabbed and read the documents exposing the “secrets” of Scientology than ever would have if Scientology has just let sleeping newsgroups be.
Today’s “sekrit number” case is a close parallel. You may not care about defeating a copy-protection scheme on your HD-DVD. You may not even know how to begin. But if somebody tells you a number is a closely guarded secret that is now being widely told, you might just be curious enough to look and save a copy of the number to your hard drive. Just in case.
What is that number again? We forget, but you can find out if you really want to Digg it.
[Pssst…. Be careful with that click. It leads to a Digg post with over 1,300 comments and could take a looooooooong time to load.]
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15 Comments
Infidel753:Right or wrong, legal or illegal, it can’t be stopped. Music has been moving out of the domain of what we call “the economy” for some time now, and it looks like movies are about to start doing so.
Where does it end? The only limits are bandwidth and the capabilities of data-copying and data-processing technology, and both of those things are going to keep on growing at an exponential rate for ever and ever. This is just the beginning.
May 2, 2007 - 3:18 pm Bryan Costin:The whole controversy is ridiculous. The industry is embrassed and enraged because everyone now knows they spent huge sums of money devising a DRM scheme that turns out to be incredibly fragile. It’s a preposterous abuse to invoke the DMCA against “distributing” a short string of numbers. Digg’s doing the right thing. And if Google had balls they’d tell the AACS where to put their cease-and-desist order.
May 2, 2007 - 4:30 pm Charlie (Colorado):You mean this number?
09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63?
May 2, 2007 - 4:33 pm Mitch:Digg.com - Live by the mob. Die by the mob. I can hear the sound of lawyers salivating.
May 2, 2007 - 4:42 pm Mister Snitch!:It looks as if your Digg link has been undug.
May 2, 2007 - 4:45 pm bud:You’re right; I read through all the newsgroup dustup over Scientolgy, and it moved my opion from “slightly weird” to “totally ridiculous”.
And I would *never* store that string of numbers - just in case, you understand - on my hard drive. On a floppy filed in the back of my desk, maybe, but not on my hard drive(s).
May 2, 2007 - 4:58 pm Van der Leun:Fixed link. For now. It seems to come and go.
May 2, 2007 - 5:09 pm djmoore:It was, perhaps, bad form for the Digg founders to publicly throw in with the mob.
Nevertheless, the mob proved its point: there is simply no way to keep a relatively short character string secret. It was immediately translated into many forms, some obvious, some creative, some mathematically arcane. It would have been impossible for Digg to even automatically scan for the key.
Speaking of things scrolling off the screen, remember the effort to suppress the DeCSS algorithm? It was much longer, hundreds of bytes, and it was impossible to suppress.
Keeping actual infringing works with sizes up to hundreds of megabytes off the site is easily practical, and I see no evidence Digg remotely planned to offer that service.
Keeping a one-line hex string off the site, much less the entire web, is impossible, and the copyright industry’s efforts to do so are simply insane.
Digg didn’t have to endorse it, but they were powerless to stop it.
May 2, 2007 - 5:29 pm Steven E. Ehrbar:Let’s note, please, that the number itself is uncopyrighted and uncopyrightable. Instead, the argument is that the number is a method of bypassing a copy control mechanism, and thus dissemination violates a provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act designed to protect copy control mechanisms.
As far as being preposterous — all distributed copy control mechanisms are inherently fragile. You can’t give somebody a coded message and the decryption key and the decryption method and expect the key and method to remain secret from the person you gave them to — but if you don’t give them the key and method, they won’t be able to view the message. All you can do is make it mildly complicated to extract the key from the black box you give them, and then prosecute anybody who does so.
May 2, 2007 - 5:36 pm docweasel:“It’s a preposterous abuse to invoke the DMCA against “distributing” a short string of numbers.”
Well, every program, image, song, heck everything there is on a computer breaks down to a (relatively) short string of numbers.
Look, either DMCA is enforcable or its not. I’ve been on both ends of it. You can’t elect not to enforce it because of mob rule. That’s the entire basis of our government, law, not mob rule.
If you don’t like it, change the law. I can hardly imagine how Digg is going to defend itself in this case, so far he seems to be arguing “well, its in the public domain already” seems weak when he helped put it there.
Lastly, as Digg seems to have aligned itself with the left, as has Google, Wikipedia and YouTube, I can only be happy to see them die by the excesses of the moonbat leftwingnuts who do things like obsessively bury any righty-blog Digg.
Like the Democrat party, all these entities are going to find that the far-left are interested in anarchy and breaking down institutions and corporations, and an institution that supports insane anarchists bent on destruction for its own sake are going to reap the whirlwind.
May 2, 2007 - 6:21 pm Keith Erskin:lolcats nos teh s3kr1t numberz
May 2, 2007 - 6:27 pm Ed Minchau:I’m sure that the buggy-whip manufacturers fought hard against the introduction of the automobile, too. Once average musicians realize that THEY DON’T NEED RECORD COMPANIES ANYMORE, and that the bulk of their profits will come from merchandising and that CDs are simply promotional items to sell that merchandising, it will be the end of the record companies. And movie makers will slowly start to realize that distribution over the internet is far easier and cheaper than distribution through theater chains as well, and that it is the merchandising where the real money is made (cf. Mel Brooks’ speech as Yogurt in Spaceballs).
May 2, 2007 - 7:31 pm Mark:only on the internet, can articles be written about digg and the problems, without mentioning the grandfather of sites, slashdot. http://www.slashdot.org
and for a link to the related article: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/02/0235228
enjoy reading the site that has en effect named for it… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect
May 2, 2007 - 11:43 pm Julian Morrison:The DMCA needs to be utterly destroyed, and a revolt at Digg is a good way to start. That’s because Digg isn’t just itself - it’s an organizing nexus for millions of online strangers. Digg, in effect, has an army.
May 2, 2007 - 11:53 pm BR:There’s already a T-Shirt, I wonder when it will make it to the illegal t-shirt page on Wikipedia. By the way this whole spectacle reminds me of the a couple of the other T-Shirts on that page.
May 3, 2007 - 5:32 am