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I’m sure most of you have heard about the latest digg news about this number (no it’s not the numbers from Lost that they had to type into a computer every 108 minutes) 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 (it’s the HD-DVD processing key you can use to decrypt and play most HD-DVD movies in Linux that apparently the movie industry wants no one to know about … umm yeah too late for that).

Anyway, over the past two days digg’s over-dedicated users have been forming a revolt against their beloved news empero after they removed a story posted by a user that cited the number above. Not only did digg remove the story, they also removed the users account completely.

Digg found Kevin Rose has since posted a message to its hardcore community in its blog stating:

“In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, 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.”

Ok, so you have that … now I see a headline today from Mashable that states ‘Fundraising for the Digg Lawsuit‘ stating that “if Digg does get sued (and it’s likely), they can get every member to donate a few dollars to the legal fund. Digg users could also significantly affect the coverage of the story on the Internet and in the press, even swaying popular opinion.”

Come on people! They (digg) make enough money to cover their assets! Let them pay for it themselves. No matter what, the ‘final say’ is still up to digg (and their staff) not the users, so if they get sued it’s on them and them alone not it’s users. If they have certain terms and condistions then they had every right to remove that story (maybe removing the user account without notice was a bit harse, but still …) they created this site and have absolute authority over it. All liability is on them as Rose stated in his blog post.

That said, I’m sure most of diggs really-extreme-hardcore-overly-excessive-posting-finatics will donate most of their savings to digg’s support … so that their soapboxes are not swiped out from under them.

More coverage on Techmeme.