In my earlier series starting with convincing the unconverted on community, I wrote in part 4 about the "assumptive close".  In it, I said the following:

Users are going to talk about your products, policies, licensing, people, everything! You really don’t get to decide this. The only decision you get to make is whether or not to participate in that conversation. You must also accept the fact that you CANNOT control the conversation. In fact, the harder you try the more impossible it is.

I guess we’ve seen a reminder about the inverse relationship between how hard you try to control the community and your ability to control it…oh how I hope I never have to learn this lesson so personally.

Obviously the trade industry lawyers for AACS hadn’t read the advice and regrettably the folks at Digg got caught between a no win and apparent litigation.  An interesting story to think through…here’s my favorite quote from the article:

An online uproar came in response to a series of cease-and-desist letters from lawyers for a group of companies that use the copy protection system, demanding that the code be removed from several Web sites.

Rather than wiping out the code …the legal notices sparked its proliferation on Web sites, in chat rooms, inside cleverly doctored digital photographs and on user-submitted news sites like Digg.com.

“It’s a perfect example of how a lawyer’s involvement can turn a little story into a huge story,” said Fred von Lohmann, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. “Now that they started sending threatening letters, the Internet has turned the number into the latest celebrity. It is now guaranteed eternal fame.”

Sean

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