The legal dispute that erupted last week between Diebold and student voting activists poses difficult questions for colleges and universities that want to promote students' political engagement and free expression, but are wary of running afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, according to university officials and legal experts.

Schools in the U.S. have long resigned themselves to complying with orders from copyright holders to shut music file swapping on their networks. However, the Diebold case stakes out new territory, as the company tries to prevent Internet users from sharing archives of employee discussions that are at the center of a heated political debate about the security of electronic voting systems.

The dispute between Diebold and various electronic voting activists arose after a computer hacker in March compromised a Web server operated by Diebold and made off with thousands of internal messages posted to Diebold online discussion boards concerning issues with Diebold election equipment. The documents were leaked to the press in August.

The controversy surrounding the Diebold documents heated up in recent weeks after members of the Swarthmore College student group "Why War?" published the discussion list archives on a Web site they maintain and began encouraging students at other colleges and universities to do the same.

Likening the Diebold memos to the now-famous Pentagon Papers that revealed U.S. government officials' internal plans for the war in Vietnam, the Swarthmore students convinced peers at more than 50 different universities to heed that call and begin mirroring the Diebold documents.

One of those was C. Scott Ananian, a graduate student in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and one of three students to mirror the Diebold document's on the campus' network. After downloading the documents from Why War?'s Web site, Ananian posted links to copies of the documents on his work computer on Oct. 27, making the documents accessible through MIT's connection to the Internet.

Prior to posting the documents, Ananian followed reports about security flaws in Diebold systems, including a July report from researchers at Johns Hopkins University about software flaws in Diebold's AccuVote-TS voting terminal. "As a patriotic American, I felt that people needed to know and that I had a duty to tell them about (the Diebold election system problems.) People need to see the primary documents to convince themselves that this stuff is real," Ananian said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.