Today's Digg leader is an article containing news that Warner Bros. has purchased The Pirate Bay, the world's largest Torrent tracker. Torrents, for the layman, is a digital method to share files, from Word documents to songs to movies to video games. They are widely used for sharing copyrighted material, making the Warner Bros. announcement a surprising one indeed. Here's why the article works:
1) An assault on web "freedom": There is a large contingency of web users who feel they have the right to share all data they please, whether or not the data is copyrighted. They were the ones who fought Metallica when Metallica fought Napster; they are the ones using sites like The Pirate Bay and Mininova that traffic in illegal material. When the government or big business removes their "right" to copyrighted material, they do their best to make a big deal out of the issue. In the case, the big deal was Digging the article as many times as possible.
2) Believable April Fool's joke: Unfortunately (or fortunately?), the article is an April Fool's hoax, meaning it is entirely untrue. However, it was presented as a real piece of news and the web site it comes from gives no evidence that the article is fake. (Except for the users that caught on and left comments.) Apparently Diggers respond well to a good April Fool's hoax. Too bad that only works one day out of the year.
Small Business and the Web
14 years ago
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