Digg the riotous PR!
Earlier this morning I was thinking about the "Digg Riot" that happened last night. Digg executives received a cease and desist letter from lawyers from AACS (the HD-DVD DRM encryption folks) asking Digg to remove items refencing decryption keys. And, fearing they would be sued out of existence, Digg complied. The reaction to Digg removing the initial messages and then removing additional messages critical of the initial deletion was swift and massive, flooding Digg's front page with user promoted items containing the encryption keys and trashing Digg's decision.
At first I was fascinated by how quickly the fortunes of a popular social media site were shifted through action taken by the very people that made up its social group. That in itself would have been fodder for me declaiming on and on for a good week. But, what really struck me was the way Digg founder Kevin Rose reacted the the riot:
"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," he wrote. "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."
It was a brilliant PR move (at least as of 2:30am the next day). It could not have been planned better (hmmmmm...?).
Think about it...
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Digg relies solely on its user's to promote items appearing elsewhere on the web. Its business model is 100% reliant on its user's actions. If enough of its users act in concert (and DRM seems enough to initiate such mass action) they can cause Digg to display whatever they want.
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Digg can never truly eliminate the publication of AACS keys, because users can keep adding them. Digg can only react after the fact.
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Digg cannot control the masses flooding the site with anti-Digg items, if the masses are angry enough to do it. The Digg community could keep this up as long as they wanted to. There was no way they could win against a backlash and still keep a profitable company going.
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There was nothing worse the AACS lawyers could do to their business then what the Digg community itself could do.
But, with Kevin Rose's post the situation clears up considerably...
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Digg looks very responsive to their users. Responsive to the point of seemingly (maybe really) risking thier business. They solidify loyalty
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If the AACS lawyers do come after them Digg has already framed the fight as David versus Goliath ("You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company."). And the odds of that are exceedingly slim anyway. With hindsight they could see that thousands of other sites were in the same boat legally and Digg had no additional liability that would make them a more attractive target. In fact, there has been little case law on this topic and the publication of the keys may not, in itself, be found in violation of the DMCA since there are legitimate non-infringing uses of the keys (including uses that fall under LoC exemptions to the DMCA).
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Digg's users quickly went back to digging the same sort of stuff they did before (gas prices, calls for impeachment, and gladiator graveyards). The riot ended, and almost all of the DRM stuff and AACS keys end up off the main page.
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The stuff Digg pulled from the site before never came back. Without new diggs it didnot end up restored.
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Digg (and Kevin) come up looking like roses to the people who will make their business work (or fail) in the future.
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They take only a very minor legal risk to do it.
Brilliant!
