Does Digg Founder Kevin Rose Weigh the Same as a Duck?

At social networking news aggregator Digg, someone posted the code to hack encrypted HD-DVDs.

Digg removed the links to the original hack, only to see hundreds of other Diggers repost the hack. Negative reaction by the Digg community eventually crashed the site.

Bryan Preston expressed sympathy for Rose's delimma at Hot Air:

My sympathies lie with Kevin on this. He’s being accused of censorship, a charge that really only ought to be leveled at the government and only when censorship is actually occurring, when all he’s doing is abiding by intellectual property law. The HD-DVD encryption code is a piece of property. Rose couldn’t let Digg become the place where the HD-DVD code got out. Doing so might destroy him and the site he founded and thereby the community that’s rioting against him now.

Later in the day, bowing to community pressure, Digg founder Kevin Rose gave in:

...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.

I feel a certain degree of sympathy for Rose as well, but find his decision to allow his company to be run by the will of an angry mob to be more than little disconcerting.

That approach didn't work too well in Salem several centuries ago, or for Radika Singh last week.

Kevin Rose may have just set himself up to be burned.

(For those that missed the duck reference in the title, click here and scroll)