I love my friends. And i love the fact that they enjoy standing up to authority to challenge their power. This week, Joe Hall decided to mirror the Diebold code to express his outrage of the abuse of copyright. And he got a cease and desist. And now he’s in the NYTimes expressing his disagreement. Go Joe!

Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a 28-year-old master’s student at the University of California at Berkeley, said he mirrored the Diebold documents because the broader issue involves the “fundamental tenets of our democracy, which is a fair and open election process.”

“My opinion is that it’s clearly a misuse of copyright law,” said Hall, a Linux buff who recently finished his master’s degree in astrophysics and is now enrolled in the School of Information Management and Systems. After receiving a DMCA notice from Diebold last Thursday, Hall disabled his mirror and has not decided whether to put it back online, which would expose him to a possible lawsuit.

A typical DMCA letter sent out by Diebold’s attorneys says: “Please note that (your) page actively encourages infringing activity. It initially pointed to one infringing Web site. When that Web site was removed two additional links were added pointing to a new Web site hosting the same infringing material.”