From Jon Garfunkel on May 2, 2007 at 5:33 AM

And then Digg reversed course: founder Kevin Rose announced that Digg will follow the will of its users. Which makes perfect sense for them.

It's the top story on TechMeme now. And news sites are carrying the story as well.

From Robert Niles on May 4, 2007 at 11:01 AM

Good call by Digg to relent.

Let's not overlook the irony that Digg's decision to stop killing those stories is what made those stories disappear from its front page.

When you run a social media website, ultimately, you are a public servant to that community. You can help shape it, guide it and lead it, but if the community decides, overwhelmingly, that it wants to go in one direction -- and rejects your best argument not to -- you either take the community's direction, or watch it abandon you for another leader.

In the political sphere, you lose power. Online, readers abandon you for another social media hub. Kevin Rose nailed it:

"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."

Ultimately, digital copy protection will be proven a failed model for protecting intellectual property. The collective brainpower and ingenuity of the public that wants open content is too great. The sooner that the publishing industries understand this, the sooner they can get to work on new business and distribution models that will protect financial compensation for content creators as well as consumer freedom.

From Tish Grier on May 4, 2007 at 12:41 PM

Just to play devil's advocate a bit: is it really the "collective brainpower and ingenuity of the public" or is it, as in the case of Digg, some, perhaps, adolescent need to "stick it to The Man"? Are we really witnessing some important phenomenon or an adolescent kvetch--like a giant temper tantrum--that got "the public" what it wanted? Keep in mind that Digg represents only a small swath of folks that are active on the Internet. They do not speak for everyone and aren't necessarily expressing any global sense of innovation or collective brainpower.

The Digg folks may have wanted the code for their own particular consumerist needs and nothing more. It should take a heck of a lot more than an incident on Digg--it should take something that transcends generation, gender(remember:Digg is mostly male), race and social class lines to change the laws.

From Jon Garfunkel on May 4, 2007 at 3:07 PM

re: "When you run a social media website, ultimately, you are a public servant to that community."

There's also the possibility that this is pretty unique to Digg. It's clear that a good portion of YouTube's users & supporters would like to see all sorts of video content on the site, regardless of the provenance. But YouTube/Google recognizes that it's bad for business to leave up content that's owned by someone else. So corporate wins.

re: "Ultimately, digital copy protection will be proven a failed model for protecting intellectual property."

That's a tangential point, but check with Apple Corp. on that one with their 2 billion iTunes downloads.