Bird sends dubious DMCA takedown notice to Boing Boing over a post explaining how to legally buy an abandoned Bird scooter and convert it to a personal scooter
Every now and then we have to remind someone that it's not illegal for people to report facts that they dislike.
Context & Ripple Effects
By late 2018 Bird was pouring resources into controlling its fleet in the field — Community Mode let the public report badly parked and damaged scooters, and the rugged Bird Zero with its digital screen was built for sharing duty rather than resale. Against that backdrop, a Boing Boing post explaining that abandoned Birds can be legally bought and converted into personal scooters struck at a real operational problem: scooters Bird had written off were re-entering circulation outside its system.
Bird's response was a DMCA takedown notice to Boing Boing, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation flagged as an attempt to suppress unflattering facts rather than protect copyright. The episode lands mid-arc for a company then publicly wrestling with unit economics — every converted scooter is both a lost potential recapture and a story about fleet decay.
First-order effects
- Boing Boing, backed by EFF's public framing that reporting disliked facts is not illegal, faces a takedown decision on a post whose subject matter — buying abandoned hardware — sits outside copyright entirely.
- Bird converts a niche blog post into a press story about its own abandoned-scooter problem, drawing attention to exactly the fleet-churn issue its DMCA notice sought to bury.
Second-order effects
- Rival shared-scooter operators watching the exchange get a live test of whether DMCA notices are a viable tool for policing coverage of their operations, or a reputational liability when outlets like Boing Boing resist.
- The salvage question — who owns a discarded shared scooter once the company abandons it — becomes a live pricing and logistics issue for Bird at precisely the moment its business-model experiments are under scrutiny.
Third-order effects
- If micromobility operators keep reaching for copyright law against factual reporting, the pattern pushes publishers and advocacy groups like EFF toward standardized counter-notices and public shaming as the default defense, raising the cost of aggressive takedowns.
- Abandoned shared-fleet hardware drifting into private hands points toward an informal secondary market that city regulators and operators alike would eventually have to account for — one more way shared mobility's asset model leaks value back to individuals.
The trend: Shared-mobility companies are testing intellectual-property tools as content-control mechanisms over their own fleets' lifecycle stories, with DMCA misuse emerging as a recurring flashpoint between operators and the press.