E3 implicated in HD-DVD piracy - Update!

11:07 PM on 05.01.2007   |   Niero

125 comments

Update!  Today the people of the internet spoke loudly with our mute and persistant clicking of... button things ... meh. Ok, so our founding fathers would call us a bunch of pansies for not storming out of our flats to burn down their Starbucks. Nevertheless, it was effective and we got business done in our boxers while watching Lost reruns in the periphery. Take that, canned oatmeal face!

In this late night blog update, an admirable set of testicles emerged in the end:

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

Commendable. Will it appease the digital rioters? It should be enough. The suits?  I'd like to see them make an example of Digg so we can finally put that angry mob to good use. You've seen the numbers. We want blood!

Original story follows...

So what the hell does this have to do with gaming? The logo of the party Loweinstein crashed last year was cleverly positioned right smack in one of the solutions. The collage features other public signs that spell out the primary key Digg is fighting to censor. Good to know that a crafty gamer out there is fighting the good fight! Some other funny gaming-related ones keep popping, including one that quotes the key as the "ultimate cheat code". HA! Meanwhile, somebody is debugging a nasty little VBscript elsewhere...

Note to the HD-DVD legal council: don't waste your time, stupid. The code is Chinese to 99% of the people involved in this Digg party. It's the guy that chatted about it on mIRC four weeks ago with his legion of 7R0Z3NCR3W M3MB34Z that they have to worry about. Book a flight to Europe and get off Kevin's back.

[Thanks to everyone that sent this in. Long live the first Digg-ital riot!!!]