Digg users spark a riot

Something happened yesterday that angered the Digg community beyond belief. Someone has done some magic with a HD DVD player to disable the copy protection on HD DVD disks. This is apparently nothing new, as the code surfaced in mid-February according to computing.co.uk. The thing that sparked a riot, however, is the fact that an article got submitted to Digg with the code, and then subsequently got removed. Removing articles from Digg for anything but a double post is a big no-no.

As I am writing this the Top in 24 Hours section of Digg is now filled with the 16 digit code or stories connected to it. In fact only one story has made the top fifteen not regarding the whole HD DVD issue, and that’s in at number fifteen.

This whole riot will die down eventually, more people use Digg than own HD DVD players, I’m sure. What is interesting is how this will affect the format war with Blu-ray. Probably in no way at all, but an end to the format war would benefit all the consumers not wanting to get stuck with the latest Betamax.

And how will this affect Digg? In the words of founder Kevin Rose:

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.