There are moments when "herd behavior" rules at Digg.com - the members would just read the story title and Digg It without giving any thought. This happens generally with stories that have already touched the Digg front pages.This morning, the website owner of quicksilverscreen.com received a Cease & Desist letter from a counsel representing Twentieth Century Fox asking QuickSilverScreen to remove certain posts from their website.
Fox hereby demands that quicksilverscreen.com promptly remove and disable the links to all unauthorized copies of Fox Properties on the quicksilverscreen.com websiteThe letter was served since some QuickSilverScreen webpages were linking to video clips of TV episodes owned by Fox which were uploaded illegally on the web. Sounds like a reasonable request.
However, the story was later posted on Digg as "Fox says: Linking is illegal" - Fox has been sending these cease and desist letters to website operators who link to DailyMotion, YouTube, Google and other video websites.
Digg crowd went on an absolute rampage (read their comments) accusing Fox of trying to change the "nature of internet" or "how the internet works."
I seriously doubt if any of these 1215 "digging minds" made any effort to understand why Fox sent the notice to QuickSilverScreen in the first place.
Say if you discover a warez site that offers pirated copies of Microsoft Office 2007 and Windows Vista - would you link to it ? Probably no because that's like spreading piracy which is again an offense.
The same applies to video content as well. QuickSilverScreen is helping the illegal distribution of pirated content (video in this case) and Fox is just asking them to end this. What's wrong then ? Someone convey this to the the wise men at Digg.
Fox is not saying that linking is illegal - they are asking people not to link to illegal content.
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/12/digg-army-is-not-wise-all-time.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
I didn't see this story on Digg but I think it just made my day. Most Digg users don't read past the headline...which I think many people have noticed and this is a prime example of that. :)
Written on 1/12/06 10:45 PM
I considered adding a question mark to the title when I posted this story to digg, but then realized that by doing so I might be losing some valuable digg loving from people who didn’t understand what I was trying to say. I think the people that aren’t “wise” are the ones who don’t realize what my title was implying. It would be absurd to think that fox was saying that ALL linking was illegal and I doubt that all the people digging this story thought that’s what I meant.
But fox did indeed say that linking to there content was illegal, which IS very questionable by the law, of course uploading pirated content to a website is against copyright law but linking to that content it is NOT illegal and fox is trying to say that it is. That’s the story.
I challenge you to prove that linking to video upload by a user without permission from the copyright holders is illegal. Uploading the content is…hosting it is…linking to it? No way, and if it was then we wouldn’t have search engines.
Written on 2/12/06 12:00 AM
Kanja - "But fox did indeed say that linking to there content was illegal.."
Here's an excerpt from the letter of Benjamin Sheffner posted on QSS:
"The below links are specific examples of quicksilverscreen.com web pages linking to video files that infringe upon Fox's intellectual property rights. Fox hereby demands that quicksilverscreen.com promptly remove and disable the links to all unauthorized copies of Fox Properties on the quicksilverscreen.com website of which it is aware, including the infringing links identified below.."
Amit - Where are the Fox lawyers saying that linking to content is illegal ?
Written on 2/12/06 12:11 AM
Linking - illegal? :O
Shhhhh.... :)
Written on 2/12/06 12:43 AM
I agree with some who cast doubt on if linking is illegal as well. Why doesn't Fox instead ask Daily Motion, Google Video, or Youtube to remove the clips i.e. attacking the source instead of scaring the little guys who merely link to them.
This reminds of the time I had asked if you linking to ripping DVDs might be a problem for you. It might follow a similar logic since you are linking to sites encouraging illegal behavior (i.e. according to DCMA).
Thoughts?
Written on 2/12/06 6:00 AM
Digg users do read article and the evidence is here. Recently hedir got some good traffic because of digg, I just read it on their blog blog.hedir.com/2006/11/16/hecom-tools/ , here the best part was that hedir was not involved at all. Not only traffic but good discussion happened there.
Linking to content is not illegal but linking to illegal content is illegal. Promotions of such videos can turn out to be harmful in long run.
Written on 2/12/06 10:18 AM
Amit,
I perfectly concur with you on this. In fact, I had very recently written on my blog about some companies misusing the service of digg to popularize their stories. Infact, there exist websites like UserSubmitter that pay members for every story in their list that they digg.
I had written about this on my blog http://nice-ideas.blogspot.com/2006/11/proof-of-digg-abuse.html
While this story was dugg about 25 times, the digg stories that were exposed to be manipulated in my blog were dugg to over 500 odd times.
Written on 2/12/06 4:46 PM
Good point Patrix. But one could use the software for ripping legal DVDs as well - like the home videos shot directly on a DVD camcorder - you may want to transfer that to a CD for playing on a computer that doesn't have a DVD drive.
Here it's all about linking to pirated stuff.
Written on 2/12/06 5:11 PM
"...QuickSilverScreen"
the same happened in Monaco...
Written on 3/12/06 12:04 PM
i agree with you
Written on 4/12/06 2:49 AM
I think this has less to do with dumb herds and more with the crazy liberal Digg base.
Fox represents everything they hate: conservativism, while that may be Fox News or News Corp - 20th Century Fox is a good enough target for them.
Written on 4/12/06 5:52 AM
The Digg interface is not conducive to reading THEN digging. You do it entirely on title / description. Opening all the stories you want to read in tabs is great.. but then are you going to really come /back/ to Digg to find the stories to Digg them? I don't. I just Digg stories if the title sounds good.
Digg should subframe destination pages and have the Digg button clickable once you finish reading the destination page for better results.
Written on 17/12/06 3:59 AM