21st century rebellion
Who controls a website when the content is user-generated? Digg recently decided that the users do - or, at least that users cannot be censored.
Digg users posted a code that breaks the copyright encryption on discs. This naturally angered the consortium group that manages the digital rights for HD-DVDs, saying it infringed on their copyright. When Digg removed the articles, the user community revolted. (DVD DRM row sparks user rebellion). Digg put the articles back.
Founder Kevin Rose explained, "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."
The founder of the platform is no longer the owner of the content. The participation culture will demand rethinking the ethical issues of web 2.0, 3.0, whatever you want to call it - and we'll need to be thinking further than a blogger code of conduct.
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I am not even close to sympathetic to DRM-mongers. These are similar and related arguments to those surrounding the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in theI don't buy that this has any serious effect on piracy (and that doesn't mean that I think stealing cars, babies or musicians is ok). DRM and the efforts to technologically enforce intellectual property rights has a serious effect when it starts to alter hardware and architecture - so that the internet becomes an extension of the ideas and principles of pre-digital industry, rather than offering us something new. I’m no techno-utopianist, but the major DRM etc advocates have, for the large part, seriously dropped the ball. Which means barricading formats; trying to maintain a high level of control over how people use and interpret culture; and also, intentionally or otherwise, denying people the ability to understand and manipulate the tools and hardware around them - propogating a culture in which we are supposed to consume, not be part of collective creation and engagement. Luckily, there are ingenious geeks to make sure that leaks always happen. But for those who can’t reverse engineer their video players, we are left wondering why we can’t play half our music on a friends computer or watch half the films I recorded seven months ago.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation have lots of good examples and information on this stuff. Friday comment rant over...