Digg Issues Cease and Desist to Diggdot.us

Diggdot.us, a site that mashes up digg, del.icio.us and Slashdot, has received a cease and desist letter from digg's lawyers. Other similar mirrors have received the same. As a result, diggdot.us has changed its name to Doggdot.us, however, it continues to index digg's feed with an asterisk in the name.

Digg has spurred a cottage industry of Web sites that scrape their feeds. In most cases, these sites layer on value-added services. For example, duggtrends caches all digg pages and provides rich stats.

Doggdot.us (formerly digggdot.us) continues provides direct links to digg pages, which makes it a lot easier for the user. They skip the visit to digg entirely and go right to the page. I subscribe to their feed. I want non-stop service, but digg loses the opportunity to serve me with ads. You gotta wonder how long that will keep up.

Comments

[getvendors]

Interesting..I can see why Digg will be upset - it is hard to build community but easy to take benefits of efforts put in by community members..Problem might not stop at Digg's revenue - unless users visit digg pages we won't get quality links..These folks at least should have a digg button next to each link so that their users don't take just benefit but also contribute to the community.. On the other hand, it is good idea to have mashups (as an alternative access path) so that community owners are not complacent with their membership and do focus on improving user experience and serving members better..

[Stephen]

The problem here is the usage of the digg trademark. Digg almost encourages syndication of the stories through the use of their blogging tool. I doubt there will be a problem with the rebrand.

[stu]

Digg telegraphed their C&D intentions a while back, with an announcement of their obligations in August:

http://diggtheblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/digg-trademarks-and-confusion.html