What do numbers mean? And are they protected the same way that words are? What if they are commercially restricted in some way? Take the numbers 0×09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0. Harmless, right? Except that they are the hexadecimal code that can be used to decrypt HD-DVD discs in Linux. Someone posted them to Digg yesterday and that post was removed, and since then dozens of similar posts have been removed - and some users have been banned. Cory Doctorow's class blog was removed after a legal threat.
This isn't exactly a new fight. The crack for the AACS key has been around for awhile now - you can even get the code on a T-shirt. But the folks behind AACS (including Microsoft, Intel, Sony and IBM) continue to threaten websites that post the numbers. There have clearly been such threats made to Digg, as co-founder Jay Adelson suggested in a blog post that tried to explain why Digg posts keep disappearing and users are being banned. But the Digg community just keeps on posting them again and again, like a tidal wave - one page had more than 15,000 Diggs before it disappeared - making Jay and the rest of the gang at Digg look like King Canute trying to stop the ocean. Jay says the site has no choice:
"Our goal is always to maintain a purely democratic system for the submission and sharing of information... however, in order for that to happen, we all need to work together to protect Digg from exposure to lawsuits that could very quickly shut us down."
Fair enough, right? But there's a wrinkle: Jay and Kevin Rose are partners in Revision 3, the video blog startup - and it is sponsored in part by HD-DVD. Now there are dark rumours about why the Digg team is so quick to remove posts and links, and to ban users (thanks to Lost Remote for that link). Just another weed in the garden of social media? Perhaps. A test of what the term "Digg community" means, definitely.
link to original post