09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0

Just spotted this on MetaFilter, and thought it was *incredibly* fascinating. My sense of things is this: someone discovered the encryption key to the HD-DVD format a few months ago. This means, essentially, that people can copy those DVD’s to their heart’s content.

Well, I guess the MPAA has been issuing takedown notices to sites that are displaying this key… and Digg was one of them. They obliged, and removed a few posts that talked about this encryption key.

The result? A ton of folks at Digg got ticked, and now almost every post on the main page contains the encryption key. This is especially amazing since, in order for a post to remain on the main page… it needs a high number of “diggs” (a “dig” is a vote from a registered user, who deems the post as having worth or merit). In many instances, several posts had upwards of thousands of diggs.

Basically, this is a rare confluence of community action: people creating posts, and also voting on other posts… all with the specific purpose of flooding the site with the very number that the MPAA is trying to censor.

This is totally fascinating to watch. It’s got geeks, tech, DRM issues, censorship issues… all rolled into one humongo PR lesson for the MPAA and Digg. Really amazing stuff.

Digg:
http://digg.com/

MetaFilter post:
http://www.metafilter.com/60808/User-revolt-at-Digg

Wired backstory:
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/02/the_new_hddvdbl.html

Slashdot backstory:
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/05/01/1935250.shtml

// Edit
Dang. Wish I had taken a screenshot last night. Looks like everything’s back to normal, and Kevin Rose issued a statement.

There’s also an interesting write-up over at Gizmodo, which includes a bunch of screenshots.