Today’s Digg user revolt should be a lesson to the various DRM interests in how not to handle bad news on the internet. Their heavy-handed attempts to block the publication of a 16-digit hexadecimal number have now resulted in it being distributed far more widely than it would have been if they’d just ignored the issue; and as an added bonus, there’s probably quite a few more people educated about the evils of DRM.
Governments have this problem too, especially the all-singing, all-dancing and all-censoring Australian government. If they hadn’t censored the 2002 film “Ken Park”, I probably wouldn’t have even heard about it. The resulting shitstorm that the censorship caused brought the film to my attention, and I made sure that I saw it – legally, while travelling in Norway, a country with a considerably more liberal attitude to its citizens’ abilities to make up their own mind about what they may see or do, than Australia is. And of course, the film was available via bittorrent, so the government’s banning of it did nothing to stop most people with decent broadband access from getting it.
So, some advice to anyone who’s had some bad news leaked onto the internet: don’t bother trying to suppress it. You’re only going to make it worse for yourself.
Oh… and naturally, I couldn’t help but contribute to today’s chaos myself 😉