College Student Sues Proctorio After Source Code Copyright Claim

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a lawsuit against the remote testing company Proctorio on behalf of Miami University student Erik Johnson. The Verge reports: The lawsuit is intended to 'quash a campaign of harassment designed to undermine important concerns' about the company's remote test-proctoring software, according to the EFF. The lawsuit intends to address the company's behavior toward Johnson in September of last year. After Johnson found out that he'd need to use the software for two of his classes, Johnson dug into the source code of Proctorio's Chrome extension and made a lengthy Twitter thread criticizing its practices -- including links to excerpts of the source code, which he'd posted on Pastebin. Proctorio CEO Mike Olsen sent Johnson a direct message on Twitter requesting that he remove the code from Pastebin, according to screenshots viewed by The Verge. After Johnson refused, Proctorio filed a copyright takedown notice, and three of the tweets were removed. (They were reinstated after TechCrunch reported on the controversy.)

In its lawsuit, the EFF is arguing that Johnson made fair use of Proctorio's code and that the company's takedown 'interfered with Johnson's First Amendment right.' 'Copyright holders should be held liable when they falsely accuse their critics of copyright infringement, especially when the goal is plainly to intimidate and undermine them,' said EFF Staff Attorney Cara Gagliano in a statement. 'I'm doing this to stand up against student surveillance, as well as abuses of copyright law,' Johnson told The Verge. 'This isn't the first, and won't be the last time a company abuses copyright law to try and make criticism more difficult. If nobody calls out this abuse of power now, it'll just keep happening.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.