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Copywriting Wrongs

Quinn Norton — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:00:00 -0500

With a presidential election around the corner, let’s look at how people pervert copyright law to squelch speech. Copyright takedown notices were never meant to stifle whistle-blowers or detractors, yet that’s become a popular use for them. Individual critics are likely to go broke even if they win a case, so people and ISPs tend to back down at lawyer point.

One of the most repugnant misuses of the takedown notice was by Diebold, a maker of electronic voting machines. Diebold responded to allegations of security flaws with an “Oh no, our machines are fine! Move along!” type of response. But leaked internal Diebold documentation posted on the net confirmed the company knew it was p0wned. Diebold couldn’t deny anything—instead it demanded the documentation be taken offline, on the basis of copyright infringement. According to the EFF, Diebold failed to pass “the giggle test” on that case.

Nobody loves its copyrights and hates its former members like the Church of Scientology. It makes the RIAA look like an amateur when it comes to suing the hell out of its critics, anywhere, anytime. The Church of Scientology has been at it the longest, too. When there’s no legitimate way to gag your critics, you’re down to sending a cease-and-desist letter or hiring a team of ninjas to take them out. The former is a lot cheaper. Even if the latter is more fun.

It goes on... the Jehovah’s Witnesses shutting down a critical website, the rapper Akon trying to shut up conservative pundit Michelle Malkin, etc.

My personal favorite is radio personality Michael Savage. Savage made some comments about Islam on his radio show that were, shall we say, colorful. The nonprofit Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) posted these comments on its site to highlight his bigotry. So Savage sued for copyright infringement. At no point did he actually try to defend his comments, he just tried to hit CAIR over the head with a big lawyer and intimidate the group into silence. In this case, the EFF stepped in and hit him back.

But it’s such a weak way to shut people up. If you really want to oppress someone, I say get the ninjas.

Quinn Norton writes about copyright for Wired News and other publications. Her work has ranged from legal journalism to the inner life of pirate organizations.

De-Anonymizing Wikipedia

Erin Simon — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 00:09:57 -0500

A new website (down at the moment after getting linked by nearly every high-profile blog there is) identifies the source of anonymous Wikipedia edits coming from governmental agencies, political parties, and corporations. Wikipedia Scanner correlates the edits' IP addresses with the blocks of IP addresses known to be owned by those organizations, and presents that information as a publicly-accessible database. When it gets back on its feet, that is.

Users have uncovered a number of self-interested changes. Someone at Diebold erased a swath of critical information about disputed elections and the Diebold CEO's fundraising from the Diebold entry. The edit was quickly reverted by another user, however, who admonished the vandalism. The FBI removed aerial photographs of Guantanamo Bay. The MPAA massaged the entry on DRM. Edits trace back to the Republican and Democratic parties, as well.

No matter what the search engines say, IP addresses are personally-identifying information.

More and more judges have been relying on Wikipedia in their opinions, and this should give them pause; you just can't trust the accuracy of something so mutable. Sure, the definition of “firewire”[pdf] probably won't be too controversial, but once you get in the habit of treating Wikipedia as authority, it'll be hard to stop. A friend of mine discovered this when she went to Wikipedia looking for a source for a brief she was writing. The article didn't cover what she wanted to rely on it to say – so she edited the page. (Needless to say, she didn't cite to Wikipedia after that).

E-Voting Screwup Puts Medical Marijuana Back On The Ballot

Erin Simon — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 22:54:19 -0500

It's time for everyone's favorite head-scratcher: e-voting! On the one hand, we all like machines and their ruthless efficiency. On the other, they make it even easier to rig elections without leaving any evidence behind, and the companies who sell them are notoriously partisan and secretive, a bad combination for an election technology.

A Berkeley, California, referendum on medical marijuana in 2004 failed by only 191 votes, so proponents of the measure went to court seeking a recount and access to records and audit logs of the Diebold e-voting machines the election had been conducted on. California law now requires a paper record of every vote, but it wasn't in place at the time, so the vote data only existed in the machines' memory. The plaintiffs eventually got their court-ordered recount, but by then the machines had been returned to Diebold – and the vote data had been erased. According to Wired's Threat Level, election officials lied to the court repeatedly about why they couldn't provide plaintiffs access to the (deleted) data, which is not a smart thing to do. Don't lie in court, kids (unless you're friends with the President, apparently).

In response, the court just tentatively voided the vote and ordered the measure back on the ballot for the next election. (Tentative here means the judge is affording the defendants a hearing to contest her decision before it becomes official.) It also issued tentative sanctions for the county officials, requiring them to pay the plaintiffs' $22,600 recount fee as well as some attorneys' fees. The result? Maybe other counties will be a little more careful with electronic voting records, and a little less trigger happy with the delete key.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Daniel Morrison.