[Foundation-l] Texas Instruments signing key controversy

[Techman224]

It has come to my attention that the Wikimedia Foundation through its "Office actions" policy removed and oversighted the signing keys for Texas Instruments calculators under a DMCA takedown notice on October 7, 2009. Cary Bass then oversighted all revisions that had the signing keys. Let me just say it might not be necessary to continue to block the signing keys. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has reported that they warned Texas Instruments about the DMCA notices as noted, "the DMCA explicitly allows reverse engineering to create interoperable custom software like the programs the hobbyists are using." [1]. Further Texas Instruments failed to respond to the letter and the deadline, so the bloggers who put up the codes put them back up. [2] Also a student at a university who posted the keys to his own personal page at the university filed a DMCA 512 counternotice. With all of this is mind, as since the keys are still up today, could we please remove the Office action and allow the keys to be posted, and un-oversight all the revisions so we could end all this vandalism and controversy on-wiki? It would be a good step to tell Texas Instruments that this is just a "Baseless Legal Threat". Also, if it's not lifted, could the Foundation explain why isn't removing the Office action? If we do allow the keys on Wikipedia, I pretty much think the EFF would support us all the way.

Thanks,

Techman224

Links:

[1] http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/10/13
[2] http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/10/texas-instruments-stop-digging-holes