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Update: I really need to proofread my stories before putting them up.

While we were sleeping last night the web saw one of the most interesting new incident of new economy legal issues, which fascinate me.

Digg, a news website where the stories are picked by you, had a massive “virtual revolt” by its community.

One of the Digg users posted a story about the decryption key for an HD-DVD. The Digg owners were given a legal demand to take that story down, to which they complied similar to the Viacom / Google incident.

The entire user community of Digg then revolted against that action, and started posting hundreds of links to that story. See the screenshot below:

So much so, that the owners had to take the famed Digg site down, and wrote a blog post that summarizes their helplessness at the hands of the community. Their co-founder Kevin Rose writes:

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.

This act raises many many interesting questions, but the simplest one is: Why couldn’t Digg turn on a “Moderation” system for the stories? That way, no matter how much the users tried to post those stories, they wouldn’t have appeared on the front page. It’s likely that the mob would have died out right at the start.