Matthew Somerville is a public-spirited UK geek who specialises in hacking badly designed websites into accessible websites, by scraping their info and repoublishing it to comply with accessibility standards.
He did this service for Odeon Cinemas, whose unusably bad website is doubly impossible if you have any disability, and made a small splash: he'd disovered a bunch of security holes in their user-data collection that he brought to their attention, he turned their website into something that all their customers could use, he put in many hours of unpaid labour to improve their public offering.
At the time, Odeon told the press that they were OK with this (how generous!), but now they've threatened to sue him, siccing lawyers on him and accusing him of infringing their trademarks, copyrights, and "database rights" (database rights are a really stupid psuedocopyright that the EU has created to allow people to copyright collections of public facts, like the names of all the colours or the start times of all the movies).
In the process of creating my site, I uncovered no less than three security
holes in your site, leading to public availability of all personal data held
on the Odeon server. I immediately informed Odeon and received the following
reply:"On behalf of ODEON I would like to extend my thanks in bringing this
flaw to our attention. As a result of the details you have sent to us, the
issue was passed to our web engineers who have solved the bug with immediate
effect. Again, thank you for your feedback and for using www.odeon.co.uk"Also, in an article in the Independent last September, you said you were not
going to ask me to take the site down – may I ask what caused your change of
view?
(Thanks, Tom!)
