In the last 24 hours or so, there had been some extraordinary developments with respect to Digg. As most of you might be aware, it all began with users submitting the decryption key code (or rather the crack of the encryption) of HD DVD. The Digg team obviously following its Terms of Use. That is when things started heating up. More stories were submitted with the key and the team kept on removing them and started banning users submitting them. This was too much an ‘insult’ for the Digg community to bear and Digg got flooded by the stories with the HD DVD decryption key. The only way to stop this was to ban all the users submitting stories with the key and this would have meant banning an unprecedented number of users.

Jay Adelson, CEO, Digg tried to give justification by citing infringement and copyright laws of companies Digg’s Terms of Use clauses. He had to say the following:

This has all come up in the past 24 hours, mostly connected to the HD-DVD hack that has been circulating online, having been posted to Digg as well as numerous other popular news and information websites. 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.

Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law. Digg’s Terms of Use, and the terms of use of most popular sites, are required by law to include policies against the infringement of intellectual property. This helps protect Digg from claims of infringement and being shut down due to the posting of infringing material by others.

Instead of having any calming effect on the community, the mob turned even furious thus making Kevin Rose, the Digg founder come out and accept the collective wish of the Digg community. He did an extraordinary stunt (that was not entirely unexpected for many) by saying something through his blog that literally means - ‘The hell with the laws, we are going to act the way you (the Digg community) want it. Even if that means demise for Digg (by the way of lawsuits and litigations) we are up to it.’ And, he sounded almost poignant for he apparently knows what was coming in the not so distant future.

Ages back, Kevin Rose took a dig (no pun intended) at Jason Calacanis when Calacanis claimed that Digg is going to pay its contributors in its next version like Netscape.

Kevin wrote in his post that he removed within hours from his blog the following:

Ya see users like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Flickr because they are contributing to true, free, democratic social platforms devoid of monetary motivations. All users on these sites are treated equally, there aren’t anchors, navigators, explorers, opera-ers, or editors. Jason, I know AOL has given you access to their war-chest, but honestly, take that money and invest it into site development. Listen to your existing community.

Yeah, with his latest shift in policy, Kevin at least seems to be practicing what he had been preaching - i.e., listening to his own existing community and by being democratic. However, did Kevin have a choice here? It was a classic case of choosing either between dying fighting and getting shot for desertion (the pun is intentionally used).

Naturally, he chose to go down the heroic way. Franticindustries.com has an interesting headline covering the news. It says, Digg goes down in flames; business as usual at Slashdot HQ. I personally believe it is a lame way to put the news mainly because:

a) It sounds like premature articulation predicting the demise of Digg at this moment arising out of yesterday’s developments. It is highly possible that Digg would be much more popular than it is today solely because of the Digg team’s stand siding with its community against corporate bullying and untenable laws. There are hundreds if not thousands of websites providing free cracks of proprietary software and this has been going on for a long, long time now. Though there may be many more such submissions by users, this one off incident can be well defended should Digg be dragged on the courtrooms. Last year in November, the California Supreme Court ruled that websites cannot be held liable for third party posts. We might see something similar here. Digg is a platform for news and information as submitted by users and not by the team itself.
b) Slashdot is not Digg. There are fundamental differences between how both the communities work. The beauty of Digg is the fact that it doesn’t have editors unlike Slashdot. Slashdot model is old-fashioned and Digg is the face of new-age Web.

However, that leaves a serious question now to be answered. Kevin might have played to the gallery by yielding to the mob. But, is this a good sign? The point being, there are a few moral issues here. First, if it was illegal to submit a story with a decryption code of a proprietary product, Digg was perfectly all right by deleting the stories and subsequently banning the users who continued to submit such stories. The users also must know that respecting the Terms of Use of the site they are members of is a fundamental duty and you just can’t arm-twist the administrators to make them accept what a majority wishes. This is terrorism. It is like bringing back the Lynch Law because the mob demands it and the hell with human rights. The popular Islamic Revolution in Iran overthrew the Shah only to be ruled by ‘mullahcrats‘ curbing basic human rights of the population now.

Sometimes, the mob mentality does more harm than good in the long run and this may just be beginning how things shape up in the Web 2.0 sphere, especially in the community-run sites like Digg.

Kevin Rose could have taken a stand on policy grounds that all users have to agree before signing up and Digg could have deleted users en masse. It might have looked ugly for a short period of time and might have also resulted in some kind of an exodus from Digg, but sooner or later, sanity would have been restored. When the tempers cooled down a bit, users would have realized that there is a line one shouldn’t cross, be it in a democratic setup or wherever.

Kevin Rose should have remembered that the negative publicity that Digg got when one of the top Digg users quit when he promised algorithm change in the site to stop Digg gaming. It hardly affected the site. Though, yesterday’s developments could have escalated on a much, much higher scale, and might have resulted in a couple of thousand of user bans, the ‘mob’ would have got the message and Digg would have stayed on the legal side of matters. The users would have returned and Digg would have been just as popular.

Kevin Rose’s tactical error (arising out of panic) might look spectacular for the time being, but then such a thing happening with one of the most popular sites on the Internet is going to have far reaching ramifications and one can be - a gang bringing down a site by pushing it over the precipice the way it did to Digg.

Image Credits: Florilegium urbanum. Thanks.