The digital commoners at Swarthmore are speaking out about voting-machine manufacturer Diebold's attempt to use copyright to hide documents that reveal serious security flaws in the software that counts votes- potentially allowing someone to tamper with the votes. Here is their press release
This sort of use of copyright to hide documents that are embarrassing to a company is the sort of thing that really makes me see red. Obviously Swarthmore Coalition is not trying to copy Diebold's internal memos to compete with Diebold or to make a buck but to reveal a serious threat to democracy. Where's the department of homeland security now? Use of a copyrighted document is fair use if it is "transformative" but there's relatively little case law on what that means. If copying an internal memo to expose a flaw threatening in our Constitutionally-mandated election system isn't "transformative" I don't know what it.