] HARRIS: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) laws,
] in the Internet world, are almost as controversial as the
] Patriot Act, because they tread on rights, contain
] draconian penalties, and can be abused in order to shut
] people up. What DMCA does is criminalize copyright
] issues. They were pushed in by the recording industry to
] prevent music piracy, but they have since been used for
] many other things.
]
] The provision that was used against us was an abuse of
] the DMCA pull-down-demand- process. Using this, a company
] can claim they own copyright to something, write a letter
] to your Internet service provider (ISP), demand that the
] offending page be removed. The ISP must pull the page
] immediately or risk losing everything. These pull-downs
] almost always take place without a court order.
]
] Now, in our case, Diebold didn't even claim we had a
] copyrighted document on our site, they complained that we
] had a LINK to an unrelated site which, in turn, had LINKS
] to documents which they claimed copyright to. And in our
] case, our ISP overstepped its bounds. We do not know the
] extent to which it was pressured to do so by Diebold or
] whether there were other types of political pressure. Our
] ISP not only pulled the offending link, it pulled the
] page the link was on, then it pulled our whole site down,
] then it removed access to the files on our FTP site so
] that we couldn't even relocate the files to another
] location. We have been told the site must remain down for
] 10 days, and we need to file a letter disputing their
] claim and bleed lawyer's fees to litigate this.
] Fortunately, David Allen, who knows about these things,
] had a techie-to-techie conversation with a rep at the
] ISP, and they decided their attorney had been wrong and
] granted us access via FTP, though the site is still not
] up.

Electronic Voting Machines: Interview with Bev Harris