Electric scooter company Bird apologized today for demanding that the publication Boing Boing remove an article about a $30 way to hack Bird scooters, as first spotted by the BBC. Bird said, “This was our mistake and we apologize to Cory Doctorow.” Bird had originally issued Boing Boing a notice of copyright infringement saying that the article writer, journalist Cory Doctorow, had promoted sales of an illegal product designed to bypass the scooters’ proprietary copyright protections.
Doctorow’s story, published in December, described a large number of Bird scooters getting abandoned on city streets and pointed out that “maybe now is a good time to invest in a $30 scooter ‘conversion kit.’” The kits would disable Bird recovery and...