Kevin Rose: "If We Lose, then what the Hell, at Least we Died Trying."

More on the "all hell has broken loose over at Digg" story. The cracked HD DVD encryption key we reported last month has been posted online and of course found its way onto Digg's front page immediately.

Digg received a takedown order and complied. The details are given Jay Adelson's post on the Digg Blog at 1pm yesterday. You can guess what happened next. The Digg Collective went crazy. So crazy in fact that at one point almost the first five pages were all stories with the 32 character AACS key either in the title or in the body.

In another Digg blog post at 9pm last night, Kevin Rose reversed the position. The title of his post is also the AACS key.

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.

Kevin Rose gets some stick from users at times, but he has to juggle the legal aspects of running a high profile site with the wishes of a very loyal and outspoken user base. Unlike Google, who caved immediately by passing on the takedown to Blogger users, Kevin is standing true to his hacker background on this one.

This reminds me of the controversy over Phil Zimmerman's PGP code several years back. The code was considered a "munition' by the US government and banned from export. It ended up on a t shirt (pictured).

What’s Happening with HD-DVD Stories? [Digg, Jay Adelson]

Kevin's post [Digg, Kevin Rose]