In late November of 2005, I was thoroughly impressed by the power of the digg community when they stood up for a wronged photographer and blogger named Thomas Hawk. This photographer found himself in a skeevey bait-and-switch deal (read original blog post). The short story is that this Brooklyn based company had a history of intimidating customers into buying more accessories to cover the loss they take on the camera bodies and other primary equipment. When the blog post made it onto digg, the community was outraged and reacted by flooding the company’s website, phone system, and e-mail services in a distributed denial of service attack. The company really crossed the wrong guy in this case. Read the entire post, it’s really good. You will get mad at the way they had treated people in the past and managed to get away with it.
I was excited by the power and swiftness with which this web vigilante group fought for Thomas Hawk. I talked about it with Bill Crosbie, one of my professors. While he was outraged over how a company could utilize these mafia scare tactics and still be in business, he was still wary of the vigilante tactics used by the digg community to retaliate. I was so impressed with the idea of vigilante justice on the web that I didn’t really see his point of view at the time. I saw it as a way to quickly weed out companies like priceritephoto. Today, I see his point.
Yesterday there was a similar digg debacle. Steve Mallett, a writer for the illustrious publisher O’Reilly was accused of stealing the code on which digg runs for use on a few of his own websites (linuxfilter.com, iTuneslove.com). The digg user ’steveexposed’, who obviously created a new account under which to post this story, even created a custom blogspot blog to show users all of the ‘facts’ (read original post). This story quickly went up the digg charts to the front page. At the time of writing this story, there are 2,835 diggs on the story, which was posted just over 24 hours ago. For those of you who don’t know, that’s a lot of diggs for one day.
This unknown user’s research unfortunately didn’t include the fact that Steve’s websites were based on pligg, an open-source version of digg’s engine. This is where the story begins to get slippery. Pligg is based on meneame.net, which is actually a partial rip-off of digg. Apparently the developers of pligg knew that meneame was influenced by digg, but they did not know that some of the code was taken directly from digg. Pligg is offered as open-source software, and as such claims the same integrity that is practiced by the rest of the open-source community.
So in this case, no harm came to Steve’s servers; the community seems to have realized that it was poor research before it was too late. However, there is something to be said about Steve Mallett’s reputation. He has been wrongfully accused of stealing someone’s original work. The digg community has realized this today, thanks partly to an article by Nathan Torkington on O’Reilly Radar (read original post). This story has also made it to the front page of digg, and has over 1700 diggs at the moment, but we can’t assume that everyone knows that Mallett is innocent. Ignorance in numbers is frightening to me.
So in the case of priceritephoto.com, this Web 2.0 vigilantism is seemingly a good thing; keeping people accountable for their actions. Is it unethical, perhaps…but so was priceritephoto.com’s conduct. Illegal? It would most likely be held in court as such. But in this instance where Steve Mallett’s character came into contention over hasty research, it is a horrible example of ignorance in numbers; the blind following the blind. This unknown blogger owes Steve Mallett a public apology.
If this type of vigilantism is seemingly good in some cases, and downright irresponsible in others, perhaps we should come to realize that these types of things should be left to the proper channels to deal with instead of taking it upon ourselves to make things right (or wrong).
In other vigilante news today, eBaumsworld.com vs. YTMND. This post on vitalsecurity.org seems to go over the issues pretty well (read original post). Essentially, the YTMND community along with a few other website communities have taken it upon themselves to fight back at eBaumsworld over habitual copyright infringement. eBaumsworld in the past has had less than great integrity regarding copyright. They even leeched a piece of software from Sega earlier this month. Besides the copyright infringement, in this case they even managed to reap the benefits of the incoming advertising dollars without paying for the bandwidth (tab picked up by Sega).
The funny thing is that this is all over a Lindsay Lohan image set, which since the infringement has been amended to reflect a copyright by the author.
Now if eBaumsworld had a better reputation, I think this mistake would have been forgiven. But they have consistently stepped on other artists’ toes to further their own gains. The community’s distaste with eBaumsworld came to a head last night and the vigilantes managed to shut down eBaumworlds’s forums.
I personally don’t agree with what eBaumsworld has done in this case, and in many other cases. There is a great Wikipedia article on their exploits (see article) which has been temporarily been frozen due to recent vandalism. Their history has shown that they don’t play by the rules and that is unacceptable. They remind me of the priceritephoto.com people in many ways.
Here is another case where vigilante justice is seemingly good. But if this type of action forms a new paradigm that is widely acceptable, it will not be good for the Internet as an entity. If it becomes commonplace for a relatively small group of people to crash a server because they do not agree with what it stands for, then the integrity of the Internet steps down to the integrity of organized crime.