It came out of nowhere.

Sometime Tuesday, a hacker website published the HD-DVD encryption key. In the right hands, this code enables the removal of all digital copyright protections from one of the new high-capacity DVDs.

Within minutes, a link to the encryption key was posted to collaborative news site Digg.com. Digg administrators, reasonably enough, surmised that they might face a liability issue, since the key was posted on their site. They removed the offending links.

They also deleted all user conversations about the key. And lots of exchanges about DRM and copyright in general. In fact, the Digg admins cut a broad swath through their own database last night, removing literally thousands of links and conversation threads.

Now, if both of our regular readers have been paying attention, they know that The Dead Hand has had significant issues with censorship at Digg. They've banned our entire site because they don't like where we stand on climate change. A Google search on digg censorship will turn up thousands of complaints suggesting that exchange on the Digg site is nowhere near as free as they assert. So when Digg's admins began mowing down content wholesale last night, they might have expected a reaction.

And did they ever get one! The Digg user community went ape. Rather than sedately posting links to the HD-DVD key and talking about it, thousands of Digg users began to flood the service with postings that included the key itself, often cleverly transformed to make it difficult for Digg admins to spot with automatic search tools. The tug of war between user postings and admin deletions became so intense that the entire Digg site shut down for at least an hour overnight, and wound up on the front page of BBC News this morning.

Ultimately, Digg founder Kevin Rose submitted to the pressure: "After seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be."

So Digg has ruled in favor of supporting the illegal distribution of a copyrighted encryption key. One wonders how this might affect their view on censoring political speech with which they disagree.