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Diebold Folds In DMCA E-Voting Lawsuit
sunbird writes "Diebold has filed a responsive pleading (PDF) in the lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to challenge Diebold's practice of using the DMCA to suppress discussion of the critical flaws with electronic voting. Diebold states that it has "decided to withdraw its existing DMCA notifications and not to issue any further ones . . . ." Other recent developments include: this transcript of the court hearing on EFF's application for a preliminary injunction and Dennis Kucinich's linking to Diebold memos from his webpage at the U.S. House of Representatives. Stay tuned- the judge has scheduled a status conference for this Monday in the case."
from the company's perspective, i'd FIRE the dimwit who championed this strategy.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I think maybe you are confusing this with IBM's countersuit against SCO. In this case, there was no precident that could be set either way. (AFAIK, IANAL)
What happened at the hearing was that the judge made it clear that he was going to provide declarative relief in favor of the plaintiff, although not an injunction on the question of the fair use of all 13,000 emails. It isn't always as crystal clear from the hearing what the judge will do, but check out this comment from the Judge:
You can see how he's not going to go for an injunction if you read the whole hearing transcript.
One very importaint thing, it became clear that because of precidents set in the Scientology case, if Diebold had sued, the court was going to have to go through all the emails and decide on a case-by-case basis which of them are subject to fair-use protections and which aren't because they contain no public-interest material or contain an overwhelming abundance of "how-to/how-not-to" information with commercial value. From a technical perspective, of course, we have already seen how some of the source code with respect to weak encryption has some of the most importaint public-interest information. There is no way any judge would be savvy enough to catch that on the first go-round, and so this would have been a real money-loser for the good guys.
So, I am very glad this didn't go to trial.
This is from the Kucinich Blog from June 20, 2003. Americans have become very sensitized to manipulation of the vote since the debacles in the 2000 presidential elections. All over america, people are expressing to me their concerns about honest elections, about election technologies, about the ownership of voting machine suppliers, about the potential for fraud...all of which can undermine our democracy. We need solutions. Here's what we can do: we can organize in every community across this country into citizen groups of individuals with technical expertise in computer programming, systems design, and working knowledge of elections. These precinct activists can begin immediately to create a template for securing the 2004 vote. The elements of such a program might include: taking action to gain access to inspect the technology, to learn what safeguards have been put in place to make sure that no coflicts of interests are involved, and to make sure there are no problems with the chain of custody. What I'm advocating is monitoring the vote. Maybe we should call it MTV2004...Monitor the vote 2004. Perhaps we could begin to post our ideas to the wiki www.civicactions.org. We will need to organize state by state or county by county. If anyone has any ideas, please go to the wiki and let's act collectively to ensure a fair election in 2004. (lifted from his Blog under his CC license).
Just last week, he blasted the FBI for stripping away the constitution. All from a man who 25 years ago, on Dec 25, 1978, refused to sell Clevelands municipal electric company under threat of political death. He stood by his principles and sacrificed his career. After a few years and hundreds of millions in savings, the people brought him back. If there is ever a candidate for president who supports rights of netizens, and "we the people", this is him. Consider a Thanksgiving day gift .
It's not a win unless the EFF wins the actual case.
If the judge allows dismissal [...]
Yes -- and I was just now trying to puzzle out just where the two recent papers leave this case (transcript of hearing for an injunction, and Diebold's new document, see links in the main article).
Hopefully somebody with better insight into the procedure here will say more, but first it looks to me as if the parties had been waiting for the judge to decide, after a hearing, whether to grant an injunction against Diebold. (Was I the only one that found the hearing transcript obviously garbled in places, and the dialogue hard to decipher? I wonder how the judge manages to make use of such scrambled text?!)
It looked as if Diebold tried to pre-empt the next step, and the upcoming decision, by filing the paper with its concessions -- as if Diebold privately reckoned after the hearing that it would likely be on the losing side.
It looks as if the ball is now at least partly with EFF on what step to try next. The Diebold paper attempts to deal with the possibility that EFF might try to find a basis on which to persist in the suit for its 'test case' value, in spite of Diebold's concessions. Clearly Diebold hopes that its concessions took away enough of the 'sting' of injury caused by its DMCA activities, to leave the plaintiffs with nothing more to sue about, and to 'kill' the case before there is an adjudication that would likely make life harder in future for Diebold and other potential DMCA claimants.
I would guess EFF is now busy in legal conference and research to see if the case really is effectively dead beyond recall. (Go EFF!) Maybe we can still hope they will identify a way to take the case forward to an adjudication that could be of value, as a precedent to limit the scope for mischievous abuse of the DMCA in future. But I suppose it is possible no way will be found.
Screw the EFF case, the one that really matters is whether we get fair votes or not.
Down in Florida they showed just what the GOP is capable of, forget the recount. Before the poll even took place the Republicans disqualified over 150,000 voters, mostly black on bogus grounds. One man was disqualified because of a conviction in 2007!
The 'scrub' list was compilled by a GOP connected firm, despite the fact that their bid was $2.5 million rather than the $57 thousand one of the other companies bid. The list was compiled by matching the first four letters of the voters name, the date of birth and the race of the voter. This is how the poll was fixed, a white voter would not lose their vote because of a black convict still in jail in Texas.
There were also tricks played with the voting machines, not just the mechanical chad ridden ones. The optical scanners can be configured to reject a ballot if an error is detected or to silently consume it. The error can be voter error or machine error.
Well guess what? In the white areas the GOP configured the machines to give the voter another try if there was a problem. In the black areas the exact same machine was configured to silently eat the ballot. That is why the rates of miscounts were so much higher in the black areas (12%) than the white areas (1%). Easy when you know how.
Click on my sig and read the Pallast article which gives the blow by blow account. And before you squeak "bias" - the inquiry vindicated every one of the NAACP allegations. Only by that time Katherine Harris and the GOP had got away with it.
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