User revolt at Digg.com and after thoughts

On May 1, 2007 there was a huge revolt by Digg.com users.

The reason: A story was posted by one of the users which detailed how a HD-DVD security key was cracked. The cracked key was also apart of the Title of the story.

Since Digg.com is favorite for Geeks (and mine too) this quickly came to notice of many users and started getting diggs by the loads. Now, when the HD-DVD company folks got a sniff of the fact that their DRM was cracked, they forwarded a Legal Cease & Desist notice to Digg.com to bring that story down with immediate effect. Fearing a legal lawsuit the Digg.com staff deleted the story without any reason given to the user who posted it.

With this all hell broke loose!

Till this day Digg.com prouded itself to be Democratic site where users decide everything. However, when it brought down this story (which in turn was posted by the user) the million odd users of Digg went berserk. They couldn't take the fact that the Digg staff considered a potential lawsuit threat more important than their freedom to post and digg the stories. As a backlash for the next 24 hours every story on Digg was a variation of the original deleted story and each of this story went ahead to get more than 10, 000 diggs each. This is what I call Badass!

This shows how pissed the users got. The Digg front page was quickly swamped with the HD-DVD stories and nothing else.

I as a big fan & a self confessed neo-Geek was following this saga with morbid fascination. This is the first time I've seen an online revolt at such a unprecedented scale.

This was nearly equivalent to bunch of Shiv-Sena goons storming the Pune electricity board and beating the hell out of electricity board officers for having done a crappy job of providing electricity to the city.(Yeah, I supported this act of Shiv-Sena ! And I'm proud of it)

The saga finally ended when Kevin Rose (founder of Digg) bowed down to peoples demand and resurrected the deleted story . In his blog post he finally agreed that Digg will fight a lawsuit if needed but will not succumb to MPAA copyright crap!

This saga one again strengthens my trust in Democratic society and power of the people.

Freedom has to be defended at any cost! Way to go Diggers!

What do you guys think of this ? So you support my view ? Please comment and let me know.