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Learning technology specialist Ian Linkletter has prevailed in an appeal ruling in the copyright infringement lawsuit brought against him by the online proctoring software company Proctorio.
The former University of British Columbia employee was sued by Proctorio in September 2020 after posting a series of tweets that linked to Proctorio faculty training videos posted on YouTube. Proctorio considered the videos confidential. They were not publicly listed on the site.
Linkletter had vocally criticized Proctorio’s product before the lawsuit and called the legal action an attempt to silence him. He described Proctorio’s product as “academic surveillance software” and was joined by more than 350 University of British Columbia students who signed a letter calling on UBC administrators to stop using Proctorio for privacy reasons.
Linkletter posted news of his legal victory on Twitter Friday, exclaiming, “Proctorio lost! The Court of Appeal quashed Proctorio's appeal in full.”
The training videos Linkletter shared had been intended only for internal university use by faculty learning to use Proctorio, the company’s CEO Mike Olsen said in a 2020 interview. He asserted that by sharing the videos publicly, Linkletter risked “showing students how to circumvent the software, which can also risk the safety and security of our platform.”
Olsen said the company sued Linkletter as a “last resort.”
“We're a bootstrapped company with limited resources in a really competitive space,” Olsen said. “At the end of the day, this is a person that was sharing our confidential IP, violating the terms of his university’s contract and antagonizing members of our social media team.”
The court disagreed, siding with Linkletter, who called the legal action a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP—a kind of lawsuit that is “a threat to freedom of expression.”
David Lux, Proctorio's director of communications said the ruling was based on a small procedural matter that the Court ruled should be addressed by the judges presiding over the larger trial, which begins February 7th.
"We look forward to presenting our full argument at that time," he said.
