If this isn’t stopped now - It’s the end of Digg
This will be the end of Digg if this is allowed to happen. This is a snippet from the article posted on the Drudge Retort. The initial source article was buried on Digg… and perhaps because it really didn’t explain the ramifications of this issue…
The fact is if this happens.. Digg is toast.. burying that article was akin to trying to stuff an elephant under a rug.. if this is not exposed… the site you found this story on won’t exist in its current format.
IN short, what happened was simple, The Drudge Retort takes a sentence as a headline, then a few sentences describing the news story.. and then a link to the AP source.. (or whatever source it is… a blog, another news company, wired magazine, engadget, gizmodo … you get the idea). However the AP called that copyright infringement and offered a take down notice to Drudge Retort… This is nearly identical to the format used on Digg for a large amount of the stories.. meaning that if this succeeds.. Digg is under direct threat… as well as other popular forums such as SqlSpace, slashdot and even simple sites like the Drudge Report are under threat..
If this succeeds you are not even really allowed to copy a headline for a link… virtually the basis of how the majority of people submit articles to Digg and others. This needs to stop now… or else you are going to see the entire basis of how many of us obtain news from social sites, forums or blogs will be under direct threat.
AP Files 7 DMCA Takedowns Against Drudge Retort
I’m currently engaged in a legal disagreement with the Associated Press, which claims that Drudge Retort users linking to its stories are violating its copyright and committing “‘hot news’ misappropriation under New York state law.” An AP attorney filed six Digital Millenium Copyright Act takedown requests this week demanding the removal of blog entries and another for a user comment.
The Retort is a community site comparable in function to Digg, Reddit and Mixx. The 8,500 users of the site contribute blog entries of their own authorship and links to interesting news articles on the web, which appear immediately on the site. None of the six entries challenged by AP, which include two that I posted myself, contains the full text of an AP story or anything close to it. They reproduce short excerpts of the articles — ranging in length from 33 to 79 words — and five of the six have a user-created headline.
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