May 02, 2007
Digital Wittenburg?
Some are hailing last night's events on Digg as a major watershed, a kind of Wittenburg Door of the digital age. The thesis?
We are consumers, and if you will not sell us content that is Free as in speech, then we will find it free as in beer.
Though that may be a little dramatic, last night does represent a pretty major turning point: this is perhaps the first time that content providers have been so openly defied by the Internet at large. It's also the first time that the challenge has been aimed directly at a revenue protection technology (come on, who are we kidding by calling it "DRM"?), not the content itself. It's also the first time that a major website that's been threatened with legal action by a media corporation has refused to comply because of immediate retaliatory action on the part of its users.
Kind of a Scylla and Charybdis choice, where the existence of the sight might be threatened in the near future by adverse legal action from a major corporation on one hand, but immediate, concrete, overwhelming negative response from the very people that make the site's existence significant on the other.
I will be very interested to see what legal repercussions, if any, flow from this.
