As I mentioned on the SCDC LiveJournal community, we weren’t able to come to a settlement with Diebold in mediation, which wasn’t really a huge surprise, given our idealistic reasons for taking the case. It was kind of a shame though, free money from Diebold would have been nice 🙂

In other news, I’ve got an interview with a Dutch reporter this weekend… she writes for this magazine Vrij Nederland, and apparently she’s writing a large article on voting in America. We keep getting all of this press from Europeans, and it really bugs me how, aside from the NY Times article, the mainstream American media has pretty much ignored this rather scandalous case. The only reason I haven’t decided that this is some sort of massive conspiracy to cover up the Diebold affair is that nobody has tried to kill me yet. At least, nobody competent…

Finally, I’ve done a bit of an update on my homepage, so check it out yo.

So it seems we actually don’t have to be afraid of Diebold coming after us for reposting the memos after all. Diebold has completely backed down, they’re withdrawing all of the existing DMCA notices and they’ve promised to stop sending new ones out. They hope to get the judge to put this through mediation instead of making a ruling. It may be too much to hope for, but I’d prefer it if we had a ruling that states unequivocally that we are right and Diebold is wrong.

And at long last the timer has run out on our counternotification to Diebold! Finally, we can link and post the infamous memos without the college cutting off our internet connection; it’s just between us and Diebold now. Go get the memos from the SCDC website 🙂

It’s nice to be able to rejoin the ranks of the brave individuals across the country hosting the memos. When you look at that page of college students who were willing to risk the wrath of a billion-dollar multi-national corporation to do their part in preserving our freedom, you are seeing the core of what may be the beginnings of a new student movement. What will they be called twenty years down the road? Are we just good, upstanding citizens? Are we hacktivists? Are we advocates for free culture? Or has the phrase that best defines our cause yet to arise?

Only time will tell.

Kathy Hamlin at Amherst wrote an excellent article for the Amherst Student that mentions our activities as well as those of David Schaich, an Amherst student who also bravely hosted the Diebold memos until the college removed them.

Hey folks, so in case you haven’t heard our next court date is November 17th, so that’s probably when you’ll be hearing from us again. Incidentally, we filed our counternotification a few days ago, so the 10-14 day timer will run out about then as well. Theoretically, we will then be able to put the Diebold documents back online, because Swarthmore will no longer be liable for our actions. So as usual, all of the excitement comes in bursts 🙂 That’s life, right? Long boring stretches interspersed with overly interesting times…