NY TIMES: File Sharing Pits Copyright Against Free Speech

["Hamaker, Chuck" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

File Sharing Pits Copyright Against Free Speech
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
NYTIMES
http://nytimes.com/2003/11/03/business/media/03secure.html
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Published: November 3, 2003

Forbidden files are circulating on the Internet and threats of lawsuits
are in the air. Music trading? No, it is the growing controversy over one
company's electronic voting systems, and the issues being raised, some
legal scholars say, are as fundamental as the sanctity of elections and
the right to free speech.

Diebold Election Systems, which makes voting machines, is waging legal war
against grass-roots advocates, including dozens of college students, who
are posting on the Internet copies of the company's internal
communications about its electronic voting machines..

snip
...

The files circulating online include thousands of e-mail messages and
memorandums dating to March 2003 from January 1999 that include
discussions of bugs in Diebold's software and warnings that its computer
network are poorly protected against hackers. Diebold has sold more than
33,000 machines, many of which have been used in elections.

..snip.

Some colleges, like Swarthmore, have bowed to the pressure and removed the
x documents from their networks. But in doing so last month, the dean,
Robert Gross, maintained that Swarthmore supported the students in spirit.
"We believe their actions express the values of the college, including its
commitment to prepare students to be engaged, socially responsible
citizens," he said in a statement. Swarthmore has encouraged the students
to keep up the debate and is providing legal advice about how to respond
to the Diebold letters, a Swarthmore spokesman, Tom Krattenmaker, said.

...

Legal scholars say that the online protest and the use of copyright law by
Diebold have broad implications and show that the copyright wars are about
more than whether Britney Spears gets royalties from downloaded songs. 

...

Copyright law, and specifically the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, are
being abused by Diebold, said Wendy Seltzer, a lawyer for the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. Copyright is supposed to
protect creative expression, Ms. Seltzer said, but in this case the law is
being evoked "because they don't want the facts out there."

..

Diebold has been trying to stop the dissemination of the files for months
with cease and desist letters, but the number of sources for the documents
continues to proliferate. Then in July, the first evaluation of the
purloined software from recognized authorities in the field - a team
involving experts and Johns Hopkins University and Rice University - found
several serious holes in the software's computer security which, if
exploited, could allow someone to vote repeatedly, or to change the votes
of others. 

...

As Diebold continued to deal with the headache resulting from its leaked
code last week, hackers released software from another of the three major
high-tech election companies, Sequoia Voting Systems. Reports of that leak
first appeared in the online news service of Wired magazine, which
suggested that the company's software also suffered from poor security
design.

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