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Interesting! From: http://phoenix.swarthmore.edu/2004-10-07/news/14281 October 7, 2004 Students win suit against e-voting company BY BENJAMIN BRADLOW After six months of waiting for a decision in a lawsuit he filed with Luke Smith ’06 and the Online Policy Group, an internet service provider, Nelson Pavlosky ’06 “was literally caught napping” when the decision was announced last Thursday. Pavlosky and Smith had won their case against Diebold Election Systems, a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, and the company will be required to pay court costs and lawyer fees. “We’d been waiting so long, I kind of forgot about [the case],” Pavlosky said. Upon awaking from his nap he was greeted by a message from Wired News asking for his thoughts on the decision. Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled in favor of Pavlosky, Smith and the OPG in their complaint against Diebold. The suit alleged that Diebold unfairly used provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent them from posting a series of internal company memos that exposed flaws in Diebold’s voting machines. The memos consisted of a series of e-mail messages between technical support personnel and sales representatives at Diebold discussing problems with their machines. The messages seemed to advocate Diebold representatives falsify security demonstrations for elections officials, as well as outlining security flaws in machines which had already been implemented in election precincts around the country. As of 2003, 37 states had contracts to use Diebold machines. When a member of the on-campus group Why War? posted the memos on the group’s Web site, Diebold threatened their ISP with a copyright infringement suit. Why War? then moved the memos to a computer on the college network, which the college disabled after receiving a similar warning from Diebold. Pavlosky and Smith then posted the memos to the Web site of the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons, and when Diebold threatened them, they launched a civil suit against the corporation. Lawyers from the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation and Jennifer Granick of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Stanford University offered to represent Pavlosky and Smith free of charge. The suit was the first to test section 512(f) of the DMCA, which stipulates that it is illegal to knowingly misuse the copyright act to try to suppress free speech, Pavlosky said. ... More: http://phoenix.swarthmore.edu/2004-10-07/news/14281 ^ ^ ^ ^ Steven L. Clift - - - W: http://publicus.net Minneapolis - - - - E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota - - - - - - T: +1.612.822.8667 USA - - - - - MSN/Y!/AIM: netclift Join my Democracies Online Newswire: http://dowire.org EDem's Election 2004 Links: http://e-democracy.org/us *** Past Messages, to Subscribe: http://dowire.org *** *** To subscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** Message body: SUB DO-WIRE *** *** To UNSUBSCRIBE instead, write: UNSUB DO-WIRE *** *** Please send submissions to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** New RSS XML Feed Available: *** http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/maillist.xml
