Users riot as the lawyers land on Digg.com

Digg, the influential news website where members vote stories up and down a scale of popularity, and where a position on the front page guarantees international attention (the so-called 'Digg Effect'), has been pushed to the brink of destruction by its members, in an abrupt and furious tussle over the freedom to publish.

The skirmish began after prominent writer-academic Cory Doctorow (pictured overleaf) revealed that lawyers representing a Digital Rights Management (DRM) developer had contacted him about an article published by one of his students on the internet.

Doctorow teaches a course that questions the ethics of DRM (designed to restrict the illegal duplication of DVDs, CDs and software). His student had published a sensitive encryption key: a string of 32 numbers and letters that could bypass theor Rose, Digg happens to be sponsored by the body representing the HD-DVD format.

When Rose asserted his rights by not only deleting stories but closing a few members' accounts, too, he looked compromised - and caused a riot. At one point yesterday, Digg's first three pages consisted entirely of stories either criticising the website or flaunting the encryption key, as ingenious Digg users fought the ban by embedding the code in images, or hiding it behind misleading headlines ("Dell Dude Lands On The Moon", for instance, linked straight to the code).

Faced with a rebellion, Kevin Rose later announced a U-turn. "We hear you," he wrote, "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 reality hasn't proved as noble. Like every battle in the blogosphere, this has been an infuriating mixture of impressive group action and petty foot-stamping. Little thought has been given by Digg users to Rose's legal position; even less to any possible equitable outcome for both consumers and the entertainment industry. Digg's latest stance does, however, leave the AACS administrators with a headache.

The code itself was discovered in February by a hacker who calls himself 'Arnezami'. It took him less than a fortnight, using a computer and a King Kong DVD, to crack a system that had been years in development.

Digg's anti-DRM community take exception with the idea that, despite having paid for a product, they're not allowed to fully own it or enjoy the right to back it up to their computers for safekeeping if they so wish. Technically the encryption key, combined with a little software, should allow them to do just that. But of course it will also allow pirates to reproduce the contents in bulk.

Now that the code's in the public domain, the AACS administrators have little to gain from crushing Digg, other than proving a point. They risk creating even more hostility and further publicising weaknesses in their system. Do they really want a showdown? ·