Phoenix, Arizona The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit today against Proctorio Inc. on behalf of college student Erik Johnson, seeking a judgment that he didn’t infringe the company’s copyrights when he linked to excerpts of its software code in tweets criticizing the software maker.
Proctorio, a developer of exam administration and surveillance software, misused the copyright takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to have Twitter remove posts by Johnson, a Miami University computer engineering undergraduate and security researcher. EFF and co-counsel Osborn Maledon said in a complaint filed today in U.S. District Court, District of Arizona, that Johnson made fair use of excerpts of Proctorio’s software code, and the company’s false claims of infringement interfered with Johnson’s First Amendment right to criticize the company.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing Proctorio on behalf of Miami University student Erik Johnson. The lawsuit comes after Johnson posted a piece of Proctorio’s code to Twitter. Proctorio said it was copyright infringement and Twitter temporarily removed three tweets in his thread. Advertisement Hide
But, Johnson says he was only showing an example of their code in an analysis he was doing on Proctorio’s software back in September.
“Hey @proctorio@artfulhacker How do you explain this? You have strings referencing “A Proctorio agent will review and verify the test taker’s room scan” and “live id check” All while still saying that professors are the only ones who can access recordings and look at students?” Johnson tweeted in a thread.
Proctorio sued for using DMCA to take down a student’s critical tweets
A university student is suing exam proctoring software maker Proctorio to “quash a campaign of harassment” against critics of the company, including an accusation that the company misused copyright laws to remove his tweets that were critical of the software.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the lawsuit this week on behalf of Miami University student Erik Johnson, who also does security research on the side, accused Proctorio of having “exploited the DMCA to undermine Johnson’s commentary.”
Twitter hid three of Johnson’s tweets after Proctorio filed a copyright takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, alleging that three of Johnson’s tweets violated the company’s copyright.
Tweets linking to source code were fair use, say digital-rights warriors Share
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Wednesday sued Proctorio, a maker of academic surveillance software, to obtain judgement that a Miami University student s tweets linking to portions of Proctorio source code on Pastebin do not violate copyright law.
Proctorio in November last year had tweets from computer science student Erik Johnson removed from Twitter using a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown request, based on the company s claim that his posts violated its intellectual property rights. Twitter subsequently restored the tweets citing Protorio s incomplete takedown request but the Pastebin code samples remain inaccessible.
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