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The Digg Army Is Not Wise All The Time

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 website
The 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.

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