Digg Surrenders to Community

First, read Digg’s Jay Adelson explaining that some stories containing an HD-DVD crack code were taken down on Digg because of a cease-and-desist letter:

What’s Happening with HD-DVD Stories?

Then, what happened next was crazy. The Digg community kept posting and digging stories about it, and Digg finally gave up and stopped trying to moderate the diggs.

Then, Digg founder Kevin Rose throws in the towel:

“today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

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.”

This is utterly nuts. This is the Digg community taking control of the site!