This whole Digg fiasco involving distribution of an AACS processing key used to unlock the DRM on HD-DVD and BlueRay disks has raised some big questions. In the web 2.0 era of media democracy how can intermediaries work without being held responsible for user content?

The YouTube liability argument is clear - videos that are not licensed are physically hosted on their servers. But in the case of Digg and companies like Bittorrent the content being “dugg” or the torrent being downloaded is taken from third party sources. The company simply exists an efficient hub for data transfer - And users expect it to be unfiltered.

Digg’s decision to “go down fighting” will be interesting to watch. For all intents and purposes the damage is done - the fact that the key is out there is old news - If it wasn’t mass-distributed Digg it would have been somewhere else. But the larger question of the culpability of user-generated content aggregators like Digg will need be hashed out in a courtroom.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 12:50 pm and is filed under DMCA, DRM, Legal, Viral, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.