photo credit: The­Re­alMichael­Moore
In a recent deci­sion, Ground Zero Museum Work­shop v. Wil­son, a Dis­trict of Mary­land court held that a for­mer web­site devel­oper who allegedly gained unau­tho­rized access to the plaintiff’s web­site after a dis­pute and altered the web­site did not vio­late the DMCA’s anti-circumvention pro­vi­sion.  In a famil­iar fact pat­tern of the jilted lover, er, I mean web­site devel­oper, the devel­oper used his pass­word to access the back end of the plaintiff’s web­site after the two par­ties had a falling out and the devel­oper resigned.  Then, depend­ing upon whose ver­sion of real­ity you choose to believe, the devel­oper either (1) pulled out the web­site func­tion­al­ity he had cre­ated and left the web­site in the same con­di­tion it was in before he started work or (2) altered the web­site so that users would think it was no longer func­tion­ing and inserted code that would redi­rect users to var­i­ous news arti­cles about the plain­tiff and its own­ers. [Read more…]