:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 10.05.2004 ::
:: "Electronic voting and copyright?" ::
From CNET News.com
By John Palfrey of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Most everyone who lived through the presidential election of 2000 would agree that it's important to have public discussion about the integrity of voting systems in America. Most everyone, except Diebold.
And Diebold sold electronic voting machines to at least 37 U.S. states in the last four years.
Computer experts have been fretting about the security of Diebold's electronic voting technology for years. In 2003, a controversial scholarly review cataloged 328 possible security problems in Diebold's systems. California decertified Diebold's touch-screen voting machines, citing security reasons. California's attorney general has sued the company for misrepresentation.
It didn't help matters that Diebold's CEO, Walden O'Dell, reportedly wrote in a fundraising letter in the summer of 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
But the most tragic part of the story has nothing to do with political partisanship. It has to do with Diebold's ill-conceived effort to use the copyright law to put a lid on the public debate about the integrity of electronic voting.
About a year ago, a rather large set of documents written by Diebold staff appeared online. Exactly how the memos got there is disputed. The 13,000 or so documents revealed internal concerns about many of the issues that had worried the computer scientists.
Diebold moved quickly to block the publication of the documents online by sending "cease and desist" letters to a woman who had posted the material, Bev Harris, and her Internet service provider.
Students at Swarthmore College, aware of the threat to the documents, copied the documents to their own Web sites. An undergraduate at Harvard, Derek Slater, among others, followed suit. The students contended that the accessibility of the documents contributed to an important civic debate and asserted that their actions were shielded by the fair use doctrine, an important exception in the copyright law. Nonetheless, the students and their schools heard promptly from Diebold's lawyers.
Diebold's legal action against the students makes perfect sense on one level. Company secrets, as well as private information about employees, were floating freely about in the ether. Shareholders would suffer. Competitors would gain.
But Diebold and its lawyers made a terrible choice in trying to stop the hemorrhaging. They decided to invoke the copyright law to cut short the debate.
Read more here.
posted by me
:: 10:33:00 AM [+] ::
...
