Kevin's Response to Digg Taking Down Story

This was really hard to find so I thought I would post it here:

Hi all, just wanted to post about this...
Almost every week we receive cease and desist letters from attorneys. With 6-7,000 new stories being submitted every day, we are bound to link to illegal content from time to time. So we get these notices. It happens.

Today we were notified about a story that linked to intellectual property that is protected under the DMCA. We contacted our attorneys, and they gave us their advice: remove the stories. If we don't, we can be held liable for damages, and by damages I mean enough to shut us down.

This is difficult. We are a small company with handful of employees, and we don't have the resources to fight a battle. I don't want risk a lawsuit that could end up with digg being shut down, so we removed the stories.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the DMCA and any DRM'ed media (including HD-DVD). I'll talk about this in detail on the diggnation episode airing May 12th.

-kevinrose

This was barried on this article.

The whole situation at Digg right now is crazy. Basically, there is no way that the number is going to be lost now. The interesting part will be the lawsuits that follow. While some people think that Digg's actions were not justified, they did consult legal advice and the user response was strong to say the least.