Diebold Found Guilty Of DMCA Violation

from the good-news dept

As if Diebold didn't have enough problems already, they've now lost a case to a bunch of students who were posting copies of the internal documents revealing that the company knew about the various security problems in their systems. Diebold responded not be dealing with the problems, but by going after the students under the DMCA, claiming that the documents were copyrighted material. Of course, amusingly, by doing so they provided proof that the documents were real and that Diebold did really know about the security problems, but just chose not to fix them. The EFF eventually sued Diebold to get them to stop sending out these bogus DMCA takedown notices -- and the judge seems to have agreed this was a violation, ruling clearly: "no reasonable copyright holder could have believed that portions of the e-mail archive discussing possible technical problems with Diebold's voting machines were protected by copyright." He also pointed out that Diebold, "knowingly materially misrepresented" the situation concerning those who posted the documents. Apparently, this is the first time a company has been found guilty of sending out bogus takedown notices, but sets a good precedent for others to fight back as well.

Leave a Comment..