Exclusive: Behind The Revision3 Fan Site Shutdown

After we posted a story about Revision3’s legal tussle with a DiggNation (the show co-hosted by Digg creator Kevin Rose) fan on Monday, our post found its way onto Digg and became one of the day’s top stories.

Now, just 48 hours later, the fan’s new site “iggdown.net” (formerly DiggDown.net) has mysteriously disappeared leaving only a "404 Error" message in its wake. I contacted the DiggNation fan (known as Striker) that we profiled looking for answers. What I found out sheds more light on the original Revision3 Vs. DiggNation Fan story.

Wired: I see that now even the iggdown.net site is down, just showing a "404 Error" message. Were you forced to take down the iggdown.net site?

Striker: 1AND1 [the site’s host] locked my whole account upon receiving the second notice from Rev3's lawyers. I am in contact with them trying to work it out. In the second letter I received from their lawyers they said that IGGDOWN was also a violation of their trademark and that they would seek $100,000 per domain for “domain squatting.”

Wired: Did you ever have direct contact via email or phone with anyone from Revision3?

__
Striker: __The closest thing I got was over PM on the official Revision3
forums. Here are Jay’s [Jay Adelson, Revision3/Digg CEO] messages in order of first sent:

(Responding to my pm where I said that I made a stats script for him)
"Do you have any sense of time breakdown on the stats, i.e. per month, or is that over all of history?"
----------------
I want to be clear on something... You do know that we at Revision3
lose money and members, and ultimately it hurts our business, when you release these videos early, right? Kevin, Alex, everyone... we're all really stunned anyone would do this to us. After general release...
fine... but before, we can't understand why a fan would want to hurt us like this.
-Jay
----------------------
Striker,
As you know, we've sent you requests for more information and appealed to you to take down diggdown. I'll make a final request for two things:

1. Stats of all downloads, including mirrors, broken out by file type, by day, for all of diggdown's history. You have promised these before.
2. Elimination of diggdown, which hurts Revision3 directly, and violates our Copyright and CC license.
   Feel free to contact me directly at jay@revision3.com. I'd like best to work with you rather than make this adversarial.
   -Jay
   -----

(this is my response to his last PM)
"Sorry for the late response. I removed the old statistic system because it was horribly inaccurate. RSS aggregators and other ghosts would artificially inflate the download statistics. I have been working on one for the past couple weeks and collecting download statistics to make sure the numbers were steady and there were no large fluxes caused by my error or by malicious users. You can reach the new download statistics page at http://www.********.net/download/stats/ . Please disregard episodes 93, 94, 95, and 96 on that page because the download counting script was still counting certain things such as HEAD requests and resumes falsely. I do not have specific records for prior episodes because with the old system each statistics page was generated from dynamic information on each mirror and since I did not make a more detailed log and those mirrors are no longer available I cannot recover that information. The only records I have prior to the new system are located at http://www.********.net/overallbandw...p?show=history and those are only a rough estimate with non-unique and repeat downloads counted."

Wired: In the past few months, when you asked for donations to help keep DiggDown going, didn't you expect some sort of backlash from
Revision3? What was your logic?

Striker: The actual logic behind it was that my fiancé at the time was upset about me spending so much time on this web site writing code etc., and it made her boil that I was paying for everything also. I put up the donation link to pay for the subscription and the hosting at
1AND1. I also had to get my manager at work to give me all Saturdays off past 10 p.m. so my Saturday hours got cut since I had to switch shifts with someone. This also upset the fiancé. The truth is, I like helping people out, even incurring the costs, but hell have no fury like a woman jealous of a PC. Two or three hours of ignoring her every
Saturday night instead of a date didn't fly well.

Wired: Has this experience soured you on DiggNation as a fan, or will you still watch the show?

Striker: I understand where they are coming from as far as not having reliable statistics to show their advertisers. What upsets me about
DiggNation now is that they are being hypocritical and promising all this content to “members" and never providing. They say I am disrespecting their members yet at the same time they moved the public release a day earlier than before and offer no bonus content as promised. They started out having donations as a way to just help them with bandwidth, then it turned into a revenue model. Then when they switched to 10 minutes of ads every show—they left the ads in for the
"members"! I will still watch the show, but it saddens me they are in a downward spiral.

Wired: What part of the story are we all missing that you might be able to clue in on?

Striker: It's a pretty cut and dry story. Fans wanted to watch it early, I provided. Not every fan can get a PayPal, some are too young or live in a unsupported country. A lot of people have used my site and then switched to Revision3's payment system when they could. I would also like to say that without the support of the mirrors, the donations no matter the size, and just the community in general I would not have been able to mirror the content for so long.