Digg is in trouble again, and once again it is over the misconception that “true” democratic news exists. Let me take a moment and paint you a picture.

The AACS is a licensing authority that controls the anti-piracy technology in HD-DVD. Muslix64 is a message board posted on Doom9 that discovered the “processing key” that controls this protection. Digg is a social news source that uses user voting to determine the relevance of a particular news item.

Alright, are you still following me?

Next comes the interesting part. In typical technophile fashion, many of Digg’s users posted Muslix64’s key onto Digg. Now lets face it, this sort of behavior could have seriously irritated the AACS, so Digg did what any good company would do when a large, angry organization with a powerful legal arm is given reason to be upset, they folded like a cheap arm chair and started removing references to the key.

Unfortunately, Digg’s users did not take this quite as lightly as Kevin Rose may have hoped. In fact, they revolted and using the power of the mo..(er, the democratic process) they made certain that every post on Digg’s front page contained this key.

A sad tale, but it does have a happy ending — at least for Digg’s many fanatical users.

Kevin Rose responded quickly and in his blog he stated that in the future no material will ever again be taken down, even if it may cost Digg its livelihood. This is a brave stance for any business man to take when it is his company at stake. The real question now is, who will be the next person to test the system?

[Thanks to Cory Doctorow and Boing Boing for the heads up]