Huh. This sounds pretty much identical to a tactic that Diebold Elections Systems used in the early 2000s, to go after people who got their hand on damning memos that revealed that the company was aware of critical and exploitable system flaws in their election machines. In particular, the dual arguments that these memos are a)stolen copyrighted material, and b)fraudlent.

Of course, this doesn’t pass the sniff test: if they’re fake, then it’s not subject to their copyright, because they didn’t produce the work in question: it’s a matter of libel law, and publishers in good faith aren’t actually liable. And if they *are* real and stolen, and thus arguably subject to copyright claims, then they fall solidly within fair use provisions.

By contrast, cease and desist notifications like this actually are illegal, as they’re covered by the anti-SLAPP provisions of the DMCA. In Deibold’s case, a couple of college students (and the EFF) counter-sued Deibold for issuing the cease-and-desists, and won. One would think things like that would make people like the Heartland Institute think twice about going this route, but evidently not.