The San Francisco Chronicle published a rather bone-headed analysis, User revolt at Digg.com shows risks of Web 2.0 (bylined Verne Kopytoff, Thursday, May 3, 2007) of the recent 09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0 dust-up on Digg.com.

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0 is allegedly an encryption key that unlocks high definition media content encrypted using the AACS standard. It was cracked and posted to a web news group, Digg’d by others, and Digg was then hit with a DMCA ‘take-down’ diktat by the MPAA (The Digital Millenium Copyright Act is an unfortunate piece of legislation passed by the U.S. Congress that is the equivalent of outlawing kitchen knives because they could be used to commit crimes. Worse, the DMCA is being used by the MPAA and the RIAA to deny citizens fair-use copyright of media those citizens have legitimately purchased. Want to back up that DVD collection? Can’t do it in the not-quite-so-free United States of America).

Digg obliged the MPAA by censoring posts containing the AACS key, but users persisted, and Digg relented.

The Chronicle’s take on the controversy? Such shenanigans are the inevitable outcome of naive Web 2.0 companies’ loose reigns on the unwashed masses of the internet. It’s such a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the internet, the web, ‘Web 2.0,’ and this whole technological arena as to be an embarrassment.

According to the Chronicle,

The dust-up underscores both the power and the danger of what has come to be known as the Web 2.0 movement, a loosely defined group of Internet sites that foster online social networks and rely heavily on purely democratic principles to promote everything from news stories to music to photographs.

In truth, ‘Web 2.0′ technologies, which revolve around delivering a desktop PC-like, rich application experience to users via web browsers and the internet, have nothing at all to do with the democratising reach of the internet and the web. If anything, the development of centrally managed locations for posting material under the control of proprietary companies such as Flickr and Digg represent a step back from ‘democracy.’

What the SF Chronicle’s author fails to grasp is that the source of the internet’s democratising power is the nature of its underlying protocols, which make all hosts present in a single space (that is, a ‘cyber’ space) with zero distance between them. This is quite unlike traditional broadcast or print media, where delivery is expensive and slow, is overwhelmingly centralised, and ‘consumers’ of media contribute very little content in return.

Kopykoff continues:

Examples of Web 2.0 sites include the video-sharing site YouTube, the user-written online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the photo-sharing site Flickr. The movement also includes wildly popular social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, on which users can interact with each other in a virtual setting.

Digg’s problems this week are just the latest example of Web 2.0 growing pains. Wikipedia is routinely buffeted by inaccurate or self-serving information, while YouTube is flooded with pirated videos.

Kopykoff has conflated so many different technologies it is difficult to know where to begin to parse the misapprehensions apart.

MySpace could hardly be called a Web 2.0 utilising site, nor would Wikipedia be put into this category. Web 2.0 makes applications such as Google Earth possible — applications that draw data from net repositories, but behave like an application residing on a local computer’s hard drive, such as Microsoft’s suite of office applications, which grew up on stand alone PCs, before there was a net.

Wikipedia’s woes — and its tremendous, novel breadth — stem directly from the ability of each host machine to talk directly to every other host machine on the internet, but again, its web presentation has probably zero of what one would call Web 2.0. Its failings are those of any mob scene, and that’s something that we learned how to cope with long before internet technology came onto the scene. Parliamentary rules of order, editors in news rooms such as Kopykoff’s, meritocratic universities, rules of civil service, and representative democracy all serve to improve the output of the ordinary human lot. Wikipedia chose to run itself as a mob would, and this has precious little to do with the medium that conveys it.

Identifying which communications are valid and sound and which are merely rumours, or the rantings of a hothead, or a mob of them, is a task little changed from the print and broadcast era.

I could continue to parse the article, but you probably get the idea. Kopykoff badly misunderstands the beast he (or she) has been sent to report on.

Sadly, the kernel of a story was there, but somehow Kopykoff missed it. It is this: why are so many people unhappy with the DMCA, the MPAA and the RIAA? Is outlawing all copying, or banning all technologies such as peer to peer communication — or strings of characters and computer programs — a legitimate means for dealing with crimes committed with those tools?

This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 3:39 am and is filed under Digital Rights / Digital Wrongs, General, Internet, Pigopoly, www. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.