Diebold
March 5, 2008 – 8:21 pm
In the spring of 2003, 15,000 internal e-mails from Diebold were leaked onto the internet. The e-mails largely showed the concern that the company had over the security of their own voting machines.
Abusing the power of the DMCA, Diebold sent cease-and-desist letters to every site that had posted the e-mails. Two college students, Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith of Swarthmore College, knew better. They knew that Diebold was not within their rights to demand that the information be removed, so they sued Diebold for abusing copyright law.
The suit drew a ton of media attention and a few days later Diebold announced that they would not try to stop anyone else from publishing the messages.
