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It all started with a story titled Spread this number. Now

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. It’s the HD-DVD processing key you can use to decrypt and play most HD-DVD movies in Linux. Movie studios are going ballistic over this leak, so Digg the story up and make it reach the front page.

The Digg mob got excited and thought it would be cool to know this to enable fellow geeks to watch HD-DVD movies on linux, but when Chester Millisock tried to digg it, the story was buried and deleted. Well the response from Chester was simple, he copy pasted the entire thing and resubmitted it to Digg with a title “Spread This Number. Again”. The new story hit front page within 3 hours and in the next 12 hours it accumulated more than 15,000 diggs. At the height of its fame the story got buried and deleted again and Chester’s account on digg got banned.

This was enough to set the Digg mob crazy, “How dare Kevin Rose and team censored us ?” Chester wrote a post “How I got banned from Digg” explaining the entire fiasco, and asking fellow diggers to take things in their hand. Fellow diggers of course obliged merrily and his post was on the front page of digg in no time.

Muhammad Saleem from Pronet Advertising tried to explain about what going on with Digg, and said that Digg is forced to do this to comply with DMCA act. He requested the mob to understand and let go:

if you want Digg to be around, stop complaining and understand that Digg had to do this, even if they didn’t want to do it. This is not censorship, merely self-preservation.

But people were not willing to let go their right to vote, and digg is all about voting isn’t it. Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg tried to explain this in his post titled What’s happening with the HD-DVD Stories ?

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.

But not this time, not anymore. Digg users continued to submit the same story again and again, as if it was the only news worthy story out their. And at last Digg gave in, and decided to go down fighting RIAA rather than fighting its user base. Kevin Rose finally announced that censorship does not hold in the Digg world, not any more:

But now, 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.

Ever since then, the HD-DVD numbers have been posted again and again on Digg.

Pete Cashmore is witty as always and has suggested a fund raising campaign for the upcoming law suit:

We can expect to see many more codes and cracks posted to the site, making it almost inevitable that Digg will get sued eventually. But this is where it could get really interesting: if Digg does get sued (and it’s likely), they can get every member to donate a few dollars to the legal fund. Digg users could also significantly affect the coverage of the story on the Internet and in the press, even swaying popular opinion. An opportunity in a crisis?

But there is also an unintended outcome of this entire backlash, and that is immense PR and marketing gained by digg. The entire event is covered by every single technology focused blog from Boing Boing and Techcrunch to CenterNetworks. The story is all over TechMeme as if there is nothing more important in the world of technology today. Hopefully this will let Digg gain the next million users quickly.