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Here is another key. This key is for Windows Vista Ultimate:YFKCB-PQRJV-G896G-VWJXY-2V3X9Hey I know it's questionable to print it here, but why not? I mean all of the same arguments over the HDDVD Hex number can be made for this number too.If Kevin decides to delete/ban my account then I can throw a tantrum too and complain and moan that my freedom of speech is being impinged 'and how can anyone possibly own a number?' etc.So why not just print all product keys here and all possibly copyrighted material - and to hell with the consequences of that too? Why is the above key, or any other key or piece of copyrighted code any different from the HDDVD hex code? Why make exceptions for a single case?I agree that Kevin and Co. probably went too far. I mean deleting and banning accounts purely based on stories hosted on other sites where the submitter of the story to digg may not have mentioned the key directly and then banning users for complaining, or for criticising Digg, or the Digg leadership was just plumb dumb. All that may have been needed was a small piece of code that prevented stories that mentioned the key within the body of the submitted story from being submitted, or which automatically deleted such stories.But in any case the whole thing was very childish. Now things really have changed. The Digg readership have realised just exactly how much power they have. It's a bit like Britain in the 1970's when the Trade Unions were all powerful. (You have to know your history a little to follow this reasoning). At that time the socialist ideal was still very much alive. 'Power to the people' was the common cry from many ordinary citizens. But ultimately as always happens when you give ordinary people too much power, the most ignorant, the most uneducated, the most brash, the most aggressive and the most brutal elements of that society push their way to the fore - and all pretence at decency and nobility are eventually lost. In Britain this meant that some very uneducated and unqualified sorts ended up dictating to the government of the day exactly what way they felt the country should be run - and in many instances the government had no option but to comply. Ultimately this resulted in chaos, with hyper inflation, a breakdown in public services, absurd levels of Trade Union militancy, such as strikes for the most trivial of reasons, such as a shortage of sugar on one specific day for the usage of workers in their coffee or tea, or because a worker might be asked to do a job in one part of the factory which was exclusively reserved for members of another Union (there are many more much more absurd examples than this, but this is just a couple I recall off the top of my head).Well anyway, the point is that when you give ordinary people ultimate power and complete freedom, the end result is almost always mob rule. This may result in violent turmoil and even revolution - and could even make the leadership of a country, or a company, or even a web site, such as Digg appear weak, ineffective and foolish.Don't get me wrong, Digg was (and I deliberately use 'was' in the past tense) a noble idea. A democracy of the people, governed entirely by the people, where no one person or group carried greater weight or importance than any other. Stories and viewpoints and issues of importance and relevance to our day, could be promoted to a level platform on which everyone could participate. Those opinions that were irrelevant and which didn't matter could be filtered by the community, so that only the smartest, most informed, the most thoughtful and most considered opinions would survive the scrutiny and critique of other diggers.It was an ideal of democracy hewn straight from the text books and customs of the ancient Greeks.However like all political ideas (since the principal if not the practice was political in origin), ultimately when taken to an extreme, it is undoubtedly likely to prove unsuccessful. It is a philosophy that contains one basic flaw - which is that specifically it assumes that all people are almost always fundamentally decent and good - and that given the opportunity they are sensible enough and intelligent enough to govern themselves. Sadly, it seems that history has shown that this is not the case.Digg was/is an exercise in unrestrained democracy, and like all such exercises in unrestrained democracy (or any similar political ideal, such as unrestrained communism, or fascism or whatever) eventually if left unchecked, it is likely only to eventually descend into a state of anarchy and chaos.I cannot say what the original creator's of Digg true intentions were - but I can guess that they really were very honorable. But I would certainly be surprised if they were not in some way at least a little disappointed at what it has become.Having said all of this I don't want to sound like an MPAA or DCMA stooge. This really was just a childish tantrum thrown by a number of extremely immature digg users. Simply because it was a single instance of one particular piece of code appears to prove this.But the OSS sympathiser in me sees how this could be made into a genuine revolution - an Internet wide and global revolt against proprietary code, DRM, the DCMA, the RIAA and all of the modern corporate evils that so many of us commonly appear to despise. If all your code genuinely is 'belong to us' then lets make it that way. Lets post product keys and copyrighted content, and illegal primes (such as the HDDVD code) everywhere and anywhere we have an opportunity. Let's open blogs, post to forums, discussion groups, email our friends and associates all our keys and links to our copyrighted content - and if that fails, write the codes and links to content as graffiti on walls, in public restrooms, on trains and buses, on T-shirts and coffee mugs etcThe result would be genuine mass scale chaos - but it would almost undoubtedly make proprietary software and content vendors and their representatives (the the RIAA, the MPAA etc) sit up and take notice and perhaps finally force them to admit that the public have rejected DRM, and restrictive software licencing terms.They can hardly under such a scenario issue a take down notice for the entire Internet - and even if they could, what is to stop people from printing or sharing this information in other ways?I do think that this was a small childish spat over nothing - but I also think that it might provide a good model for a larger and more profound revolution. However as Digg has shown, I don't think that this can be done without some form of coherant determined and skilled leadership either.

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