Ridiculous: One Digg Clone Takes Legal Action Against Another Digg Clone
File this under "ridiculous." Digg clone SuperGu has sent a cease & desist letter to (open source) Digg clone Pligg alleging a number of copyright infringements. — Among the complaints: SuperGu is claiming ownership …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Digg clone market has been crowded enough to draw attention before: Digg itself posted about trademark confusion among lookalike sites back in August 2006, and TechCrunch's own "Digg Should Sue Wired" piece earlier this month showed how touchy attribution and ownership questions have become around the format. Now the enforcement impulse has turned inward — clone against clone.
SuperGu's cease & desist to Pligg lands on an awkward target: Pligg is open source, so its code is by design freely copied and forked, and Free Software Magazine's interview with Eric Heikkinen signals the project intends to answer publicly rather than quietly comply. The irony TechCrunch flags — one Digg clone claiming ownership over a category built on cloning — is the story.
First-order effects
- Pligg, an open-source project run by volunteers, now faces a legal threat it likely cannot match with litigation budgets, putting its distribution and development at risk regardless of the merits of SuperGu's copyright claims.
Second-order effects
- Other Digg clones watching this dispute will tighten their own licensing, attribution, and code-provenance practices, since SuperGu has established that clone-vs-clone infringement claims are a live tactic in this niche.
Third-order effects
- If clone operators start enforcing 'ownership' over community-voting features, the clone economy around Digg shifts from commodity copying toward contested IP territory — a preview of how thin the line between inspired-by and infringing can be for social-news mechanics.
The trend: The social-news boom is entering an enforcement phase where the copycats themselves begin litigating over who owns the copied mechanics.