The New York Times has a good overview article on the Diebold controversy.
Diebold Election Systems, which makes voting machines, is waging legal war against grass-roots advocates, including dozens of college students, who are posting on the Internet copies of the company's internal communications about its electronic voting machines. . . .
Diebold, however, says it is a case of copyright infringement, and has sent cease-and-desist orders to the students and, in many cases, their colleges, demanding that the 15,000 e-mail messages and memorandums be removed from each Web site. "We reserve the right to protect that which we feel is proprietary," a spokesman for Diebold, David Bear, said. . . .
The files circulating online include thousands of e-mail messages and memorandums dating to March 2003 from January 1999 that include discussions of bugs in Diebold's software and warnings that its computer network are poorly protected against hackers. Diebold has sold more than 33,000 machines, many of which have been used in elections. . . .
Nelson Pavlosky, a sophomore at Swarthmore . . . said the cease-and-desist letters were "a perfect example of how copyright law can be and is abused by corporations like Diebold" to stifle freedom of speech.
The article helpfully implies that this is a much more sympathetic way to oppose existing copyright law than sharing MP3s and movie files. Read the article here.