The public was angry; they had had enough of the harsh oppression, the unrelenting control, and the panoptic supervision of the ruling elite. No longer was a distant monarchy going to exert its tyrannical oppression over the well-meaning individual; and the events that would soon come to pass where going to definitively prove that times were changing. Dressed up to disguise their identity, a passionate group of men boarded the HMS Dartmouth and dumped 45 tons of English tea into the harbor. The Boston Tea Party sent an unmistakably clear message to the British parliament: enough is enough; either policies start changing right away, or there will be far more serious consequences. The events of that day, the 16th of December, 1773, symbolized the final spark needed to light the fuse of unanimous revolt. Today, 233 years and 138 days later, a similar contempt lingers in the air, albeit in the digital realm.

Much like the Boston Tea Party, the revolt that Digg, a user driven social content website, is experiencing has not gone, and will not go, unnoticed. The rebellion is one of the first en masse protests against the forceful establishment of a DRM-driven society; a society in which everyone who wishes to use, sample, or share creative content must pay – over and over again. However, the enforcement of such a policy can only be truly effective through the placement of restrictions on the rights of the user, through the establishment of a system of Digital Rights Management, or DRM.

Unfortunately, the DRM systems currently in place are fundamentally flawed in their implementations and are also completely obvious to the notion of Fair Use, and as such they only really present a hindrance to casual users in their futile attempts to eradicate digital piracy. A paying user ought to be able to play, store, back-up, and share the content that he has legally bought without having to worry about such idiotically restrictive laws as the DMCA – sure, the DMCA does have some legitimate uses, but for the most part it has only managed to piss off the casual, well meaning consumer.

The fact that not a single content protection system has yet been able to reliably do what it was meant to do, has seriously upset an extremely passionate and dedicated group of individuals. Most of these individuals have no intention of illegally distributing copyrighted content, but the fact that varies companies and organizations are in essence forcing their users to become pirates to do what they would only naturally want to do has really taken its toll.

Tuesday, May 1st, a single submission which contained a recently discovered decryption key code for the AACS content (…or should I say “revenue”) protection scheme used to protect HD-DVDs found its way onto Digg. In near-record time the story secured a place on the coveted front page of the site. It didn’t take long for the watch dogs over at the Advanced Access Content System consortium to take notice and react with yet another DMCA takedown notice. Jay Adelson, the CEO of Digg, was naturally concerned about the continued, hassle-free existence of the site and as such decided that it would be in everyone’s best interest if he followed his lawyer’s advice and removed the submission. Furthermore, Jay also made it abundantly clear in his blog post that the reason for removal of the story was purely legal in nature, and that it had nothing to do with censorship:

Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law. Digg’s Terms of Use, and the terms of use of most popular sites, are required by law to include policies against the infringement of intellectual property. This helps protect Digg from claims of infringement and being shut down due to the posting of infringing material by others.

Our goal is always to maintain a purely democratic system for the submission and sharing of information – and we want Digg to continue to be a great resource for finding the best content. 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.

Unfortunately, the removal of the story did not go unnoticed – far, far from it. Within hours of the removal of the story, the entire Digg community seemed to be in uproar over the fact that their favorite news website would kowtow to bigger company. In response to the removal of the original story and also to illustrate to the AACS consortium how futile their efforts were, Digg die-hards flooded the front page with countless stories that in some way revealed the leaked hexadecimal key. Some stories were blatant in their purpose, while others found very creative ways to sneak the code in.

At first, the executives over at Digg tried to keep up their end of the law by deleting and preventing the submission of further stories about the key code. However, it soon became apparent that their efforts were just as futile as those of the government. This is where things took a surprising turn – supporters of a DMCA-free world might say this next event represented a small victory, but I contend otherwise. At 9 PM that evening, Kevin made a surprisingly stupid move; he actually posted the key code along with a concession that the efforts of the Digg community were beyond his power to control. Here is the post in its entirety:

Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c1

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

Kevin got far too caught up in the heat of the moment, and from a legal perspective he may very well have just killed Digg. In his post he blames the Digg community for not respecting the Terms of Use that Digg has in place. However, as this scenario unfolds the number of submissions to Digg that reveal the actual key code are irrelevant as long as Kevin, as one of the main honchos in charge of the start-up, is able to maintain that he and the rest of the executives did everything in their power to prevent the posting of the key. Not only does he admit that no one will be trying to prevent the posting of the code, he actually did it himself. If the AACS consortium or another company with a big stake in the prevention of piracy decides to press charges against Kevin’s site, they’d have a field day; Kevin would have a hard time “Digging” himself out of trouble.

The events that lead up to the Boston Tea Party in 1773 were, in many ways, quite similar to what we are seeing at the moment in the digital domain. The Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Acts of 1767 had angered well-meaning colonists for years, much like DRMs are doing today. Eventually, the anger over the policies became so extreme that something had to happen; something had to illustrate to the British that the colonist were fed up with the restrictions and regulations. As Steve Jobs said in his essay Thoughts on Music, “DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt piracy.” If the current restrictive trend continues then we might very well see another “digital Boston Tea Party” in the near future – (Thanks to Forbes.com for noticing that quote in the numerous Digg comments).