SWARTHMORE, Pa. -- Swarthmore student activists are making national headlines with their efforts to circulate documents from Diebold Election Systems, Inc., that call attention to problems with the company’s electronic voting machines. On Election Day, sophomores Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online activist group, filed suit in a California federal court against the company. The move, seeking to enjoin Diebold from claiming copyright infringement over the documents’ release, is the latest in a fast-changing and increasingly taut battle between a growing number of activists and the company.
Although the documents — more than 15,000 company memos and e-mail messages — had been available online for months, they did not become media fodder until the end of October when Diebold issued cease-and-desist orders to programmers and others, including several Swarthmore students, who posted them on the Internet. Diebold maintained it is a case of copyright infringement and demanded that they be removed from each Web site. “We reserve the right to protect that which we feel is proprietary,” a Diebold spokesman told the New York Times.
In response to the orders, and to bring the college into compliance with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the administration asked any cited to Diebold to remove the memos, or links to them, from their web pages. Dean Robert Gross ’62 says this was done on the advice of legal counsel, despite the college’s support of the students’ cause.
While not confronting the company directly, the college encouraged students to file under the copyright law a “counter-notification” against Diebold’s take-down demand. In addition, the administration alerted students that it is defensible on fair-use and free-speech grounds to use their web sites to describe the content of the memos they have seen and their implications for American democracy, and to use their sites to inform interested members of the public that the memos are available at sites not associated with Swarthmore. The College also challenged Diebold in writing to back up its claim of copyright infringement.
“The College administration applauds our students for their idealism and initiative, for acting on their consciences in the interest of fair elections and healthy democracy,” Gross said in a statement. “We believe their actions express the values of the College, including its commitment to prepare students to be engaged, socially responsible citizens.”
However, some students think the college should have been more supportive. Pavlosky, who put documents online through the campus organization Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons, told the Times the cease-and-desist letters were “a perfect example of how copyright law can be and is abused” to stifle freedom of speech. He added that he and other advocates wished the college had decided to fight instead of take down the files.
The files circulating online include discussions of bugs in Diebold’s software and warnings that its computer network are poorly protected against hackers. Critics have also leveled charges of partisanship against the company, noting that company executives have made large contributions to the Republican Party and therefore have an interest in the election results their systems tabulate. The students say that by trying to spread the word about problems with the company’s software, they are performing a valuable service for the good of American democracy.
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