User-generated power, that’s how I’d define what digg users accomplished in the last few days. Their landslide protest and outrage kept up & running those links/posts citing the encryption key for the HD DVD format, something intolerable for the movie studios. (Too bad I wasn’t around to be part of that great crowdsourcing effort.) Or, as EFF’s Fred von Lohmann pointed out, “This is the revenge of user-generated content”. Yes, indeed. As CEO Jay Adelson explains today in this interview and founder Kevin Rose posted yesterday on his blog, they understood the larger implications on the table and, after a first dithering, did the right thing. We all should be grateful to digg users for their unwillingness to bow to Hollywood demands, and starting instead a long line of civil disobedience actions. A successful, prompt online activism that exposed the attempt to restrict free speech by the usual suspects and, in case someone didn’t notice it, the futility of DRM itself as well. Well done, digg!
(Today even The New York Times has a long report from San Francisco, with this opening: There is open revolt on the Web.)