Electric Scooter Rental Service Bird Sent a 'Notice of Claimed Infringement' To a News Site For Reporting On Lawful Re-use of Scooters (eff.org)

Bird, an electric scooter rental company, sent a "Notice of Claimed Infringement" to news blog Boing Boing for reporting about people doing legal things that Bird does not like. EFF reports: Electric scooters have swamped a number of cities across the US, many of the scooters carelessly discarded in public spaces. Bird, though, has pioneered a new way to pollute the commons by sending a meritless takedown letter to a journalist covering the issue. The company cites the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and implies that even writing about the issue could be illegal. It's not.

Bird sent a "Notice of Claimed Infringement" over this article on Boing Boing, one of the Internet's leading sources of news and commentary. The article reports on the fact that large numbers of Bird scooters are winding up in impound lots, and that it's possible to lawfully purchase these scooters when cities auction them off, and then to lawfully modify those scooters so they work without the Bird app. The letter is necessarily vague about exactly how the post infringed any of Bird's rights, and with good reason: the post does no such thing, as we explain in a letter on behalf of Happy Mutants LLC, which owns and operates Boing Boing.

The post reports on lawful activity, nothing more. In fact, the First Amendment would have protected it even if reported on illegal conduct or advocated for people to break the law. (For instance, a person might lawfully advocate that an electric scooter startup should violate local parking ordinances. Hypothetically.) So, in a sense, it doesn't matter whether Bird is right or wrong when it claims that it's illegal to convert a Bird scooter to a personal scooter. Either way, Boing Boing was free to report on it.

Comments

Re:Title

[Pinky's Brain]

They were already being impounded and sold at auction, but they were buying them back.

The article will cause people to bid up these things now to mod/scavenge them ... so it becomes far more costly for them.

Depends

[fermion]

If the scooters violated some city law and were legally impounded. The Bird has to fight to have law removed or adjusted.

Bird has the right to pay the impound fee, as many of us have done, or have the vehicle seized, which has happened to some of us.

At that it becomes government property and they have the right to do what they can to reclaim their costs. It is unfair for bird to expect the local taxpayer to secretly subsidize their business model.

Now the tricky thing here, to me, is that company have successfully argued that even if someone buys stuff, that certain parts of the machine is not under the control of the person who purchased the thing. For instance, john deere just won the right to keep their customers from repairing the tractors. If this were transferable to the scooters, then bird has a case.

And if this were the case, then the city has a case to sue Bird directly for damages it cannot recover from resale.

Re:Depends

[Sir Holo]

In my City, these scooters littering public spaces are legally "abandoned property". That means anyone can take a scooter or two off of the sidewalk and scrap it out. Legally.

Check your local City Code.

Re:Title

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of me wonders whether this was the business strategy all along. Why spend money tracking/policing scooter returns, when the government can scoop them all up for free and the company pays a small fee to get them back. Privatize the profits, socialize the costs.

Of course, the cost of reacquiring the scooters just went up with the conversion kits and auctions. I rather enjoy when unscrupulous business tactics backfire like this. Time to rethink the business strategy I think.

Re:Can't wait for the scooter fad to end

[Altus]

Ya know they had the lime scooters in Paris when I was there recently and I didn't see them piled up all over the place. What I did see was a lot of people using them for short distance trips, hell I rarely saw one that didn't have a person on it. It's a shame that we in the US seem to have this problem with them because they seemed to be pretty effective in Europe and as someone who commutes via public transit into a major metro, I would love to have these available for getting around the city more quickly.

Honestly I suspect part of the issue is that in America we are too busy sitting in our cars to keep these things in use as opposed to just sitting on a sidewalk somewhere.

That said this takedown letter from Bird is absolute crap