Skip to main content

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.

Popular posts from this blog

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include

PhishTank Detects Phishing Websites by Digg Style Voting

OpenDNS, a free service that helps anyone surf the Internet faster with a simple DNS tweak , will announce PhishTank today. PhishTank is a free public database of phishing URLs where anyone can submit their phishes via email or through the website. The submissions are verified by the other community members who then vote for the suspected site. This is such a neat idea as sites can be categorized just based on user feedback without even having to manually verify each and every submission. PhishTank employs the "feedback loop" mechanism where users will be kept updated with the status' of the phish they submit either via email alerts or a personal RSS feed . Naturally, once the PhishTank databases grows, other sites can harness the data using open APIs which will remain free. OpenDNS would also use this data to improve their existing phishing detection algorithms which are already very impressive and efficient. PhishTank | PhishTank Blog [Thanks Allison] Related: Google

Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by  Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include  Gmail Mail Merge  (send personalized emails with Gmail ),  Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and   File Upload Forms ( receive files  in Google Drive). Also see  Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.