Swarthmore Actively Opposes E-Civil Disobedience Campaign

As noted yesterday ((Electronic) Civil Disobedience at Swarthmore), students at Swarthmore have begun an electronic civil disobedience action to keep on hosting internal memos about the security failings and knowledge of same from the electronic voting machine manufacturerer Diebold. Diebold has been waging a DMCA-based notice-and-takedown campaign to keep those damning memos off the internet. Students at Swarthmore have attempted to defeat this campaign by playing an organized game of whack-a-mole, as volunteers take over hosting once a current host receives a notice-and-takedown letter.

Yesterday afternoon, the students met with Swarthmore's Dean. Rather than provide support for, or at least take no action against, the students, Swarthmore has decided to cooperate with Diebold. According to the (Campaign Update: Day Two), it seems that Swarthmore is pre-emptively disabling the network accounts of any student hosting the files. Although the post is somewhat unclear it seems that Swarthmore intends to shut down all network access for a student hosting the files, even if that particular student has not yet been challenged by Diebold. This seems to be a very risk adverse position for the university to take and counter to its academic mission. Certainly, the university is under no obligation to shut down all network access to the protesters, but merely remove the offending files. Multiple violations by the same individual could be a different concern, but this is not what is being alleged. Furthermore, it is not clear to me that Swarthmore has a legal obligation to actively take down websites prior to notification by the alleged copyright holder. I can't say for sure without some more review, but I believe the DMCA safe harbor provisions would provide plenty of protection if the university merely waited for the inevitable notice-and-takedown letters to arrive before taking action.

In any case, in response, the two student groups behind the protest, Why War? and Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons (which no longer appears to be functioning), have decided to take two different paths. Why War? will continue hosting the files, while the SCDC has taken down the files but will face Diebold in court.

This looks to be a very interesting action on both sides.