What's Happening with HD-DVD Stories?
I just wanted to explain what some of you have been noticing around some stories that have been submitted to Digg on the HD DVD encryption key being cracked. — This has all come up in the past 24 hours, mostly connected to the HD-DVD hack …
Context & Ripple Effects
Digg spent early 2007 fending off trust problems of its own making: bloggers alleged a coordinated 'bury brigade' was manipulating story rankings, pay-for-votes emails to prominent users were exposed, and in March the company declined to explain how its blocking back-end works — even as it celebrated crossing one million registered users. Then, inside 24 hours, submissions about the purported cracking of an HD DVD encryption key flooded the site, and Digg began pulling them down.
First-order effects
- Digg reversed itself within a day: after deleting key-bearing submissions, its own blog republished the disputed hex string, conceding that enforcing takedowns cost more with its million-strong community than the legal risk it avoided.
- Rights holders behind the HD DVD key saw their enforcement tactic invert — each deletion spawned fresh copies of the number across blogs, forums, and aggregators within hours.
Second-order effects
- Every other user-voted platform now faces the same test Digg flunked publicly — honor takedown demands and risk a community revolt, or host the key and carry the legal exposure — pressuring rivals to draft explicit policies they had left implicit.
- The revolt hands DRM critics a concrete case study that suppression spreads a secret faster than lawyers can remove it, sharpening arguments already circulating in the high-definition format fight.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, key-based copy protection on consumer media is structurally fragile: one leak plus a mobilized community defeats takedown-based enforcement, pushing vendors toward revocable or hardware-tied schemes whose update cycles become recurring battlegrounds.
- Governance becomes a competitive dimension for community-ranked sites — legal compliance that overrides the collective vote attacks the product itself, so published takedown policies turn into user-trust infrastructure rather than fine print.
The trend: Copyright enforcement by takedown is colliding with mobilized online communities, turning suppressed digital artifacts — encryption keys first among them — into viral causes.