Digg this: AACS takedown notice backfires

In response to legal threats from the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator (AACS LA), Digg administrators started removing references to a cracked HD-DVD encryption key on Tuesday. The key could be used to defeat copy protection on HD-DVD and Blu-ray content, and allow playback on unauthorized systems (like Linux). At 1pm Jay Adelson wrote:

We’ve been notified by the owners of this intellectual property that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights. In order to respect these rights and to comply with the law, we have removed postings of the key that have been brought to our attention. ...

Our goal is always to maintain a purely democratic system for the submission and sharing of information - and we want Digg to continue to be a great resource for finding the best content. However, in order for that to happen, we all need to work together to protect Digg from exposure to lawsuits that could very quickly shut us down.

The result? Complete and utter chaos. Tens of thousands of Digg users posted story after story containing the 16-digit encryption key. Traffic on the site was so high that it was unavailable for parts of the day. By 9pm, Digg cried 'uncle'. Founder Kevin Rose wrote:

Today was an insane day... After seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

So instead of supressing the code, all the AACS managed to do was generate a ton of negative publicity and spread thousands of copies of the code indelibly all over the internet. Will they ever learn?