It looks like the Digg site is being buried by an irate crowd of their own creation. There’s a large hexadecimal number you need to backup your HD-DVD’s - I won’t include it here - but they were pressed to remove some postings from Digg which contained that information. Turns out it can be considered intellectual property. (It’s also been said they get advertising from an HD DVD interested party.) Digg describes their reasoning, quoted briefly below.

Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law. Digg’s Terms of Use, and the terms of use of most popular sites, are required by law to include policies against the infringement of intellectual property. This helps protect Digg from claims of infringement and being shut down due to the posting of infringing material by others.

Sounds fair to me but the Digg crowd didn’t like it. There seems to be a crowd digging everything they can find with the number on it. Just now for example third item in the list on their front page is a post entitled EVERY SINGLE story on front page is the key.

Poor Digg. Poor compainies clinging to DRM based business models, too. They’re keeping busy this week.

Any thoughts on this one, people?

Myself I don’t mind buying music and movies, especially since I’m not a big collector. One of the things I’ve tried to teach Brenda too is: don’t keep the original cd’s in the car! She’s lost a number of them that way. That’s why I really like the clear legal drm free digital license you get with a CD. In fact the DRM on iTunes is something that stops me from investing a lot in buying singles there.

Why is the CD the only format which has those qualities? It’s not like the piracy problems are coming from the people who go out and buy the original media, and it’s not like DRM on digital media is stopping the distribution of ripped content. The industry needs a huge reality check.