Today, I watched an incident unfold that was enough to convince me that Digg is a legal minefield waiting to happen.
In short, a ridiculous rumour was posted to a gaming website, subsequently dugg, and went ballistic, clocking up more than 800 diggs at the time of writing it, and being one-of-the-top ten stories of the [...]
Today, I watched an incident unfold that was enough to convince me that Digg is a legal minefield waiting to happen.
In short, a ridiculous rumour was posted to a gaming website, subsequently dugg, and went ballistic, clocking up more than 800 diggs at the time of writing it, and being one-of-the-top ten stories of the day. The rumour said that Gamepro Australia had accepted a bribe to write a negative review of a game. It was based on a single post submitted at competing gaming site Gamespot.com.au.
I can’t imagine any professional journalist for a moment even entertaining the idea of accepting a bribe to write a negative review, nor could I for a moment accept that the world’s biggest gaming company would engage in such dodgy PR practices. The whole story was so obviously inaccurate, but apparently not so much, that hundreds of people promoted the story to near-the-top of Digg.
The GWN story is libellous and IDG Australia and the editors and journalists in question would have a very good case if they chose to sue.
I actually sent them a few questions, asking if they were prepared to stand by the story, if it was legally challenged and the story was finally shellacked on Digg and what do you know, within a couple of hours, the “allegation” was removed.
check it out :
http://squash.wordpress.com/2007/03/08/digg-ing-a-legal-hole-for-itself/