http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6615047.stm

Last night Digg.com had a user rebellion: tens of thousands of users bombarded the digg homepage with the AACS’s HDDVD encryption key. Digg had previously said it would delete all references to the key - like wikipedia and boingboing, among other blogs, have. But, users revolting. For nearly five hours last night, every single story submitted on digg was about the key and every story on the front page was about they key too. Users did not want to be censored. Every story on the first 2-3 pages had nearly 5000 diggs - a new record for anything on the front page. Finally, digg crashed under the stress of the attack.

Later, Kevin Rose posted a blog entry at the Digg Blog that says:

 

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. 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.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, 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 on,

Kevin

Digg is still down as of this morning. This just goes to show how information cascades can form. No one even knew of the key before last night and now millions of people do. It will be interesting to see if the AACS still sues digg and what kind of implications this has for the DMCA and internet copyright laws.