Did Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton really prevail over Sen. Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential primary in New Jersey in February? That’s the official word. But Edward W. Felten, a renowned computer-security expert at Princeton University, who regularly takes apart electronic voting machines, is raising questions.

He analyzed vote totals from three different sources in the New Jersey district of Pennsauken, and discovered a disquieting discrepancy in the Democratic count. (People cast their votes on Sequoia touch-screen voting machines.) Vote totals reported by the country clerk show 279 votes were cast: 181 for Ms. Clinton, 94 for Mr. Obama, two for Gov. Bill Richardson, one for John Edwards, and one for Sen. Joseph Biden. Voting machines tapes confirm that the total Democratic turnout in the district was 279. But a tape of “candidate totals”...

The tech blogosphere is atwitter over a new paper from the Progress & Freedom Foundation criticizing Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor.

The paper, by Thomas D. Sydnor II, a senior fellow and director of PFF’s Center for the Study of Digital Property, says that Mr. Lessig’s 2004 book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity “‘demonize[s]’ property owners in order to convince the government to impose a form of ‘radical’ and ‘quasi-socialist’ utopianism.” It also refers to Mr. Lessig as a “name-calling demagogue.”

The paper from PFF, a market-oriented, technology and public-policy think tank, has been criticized by some

Google recently announced the winners of the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarships, awarded to women who are studying computer science and related fields.

In the U.S., 23 women were given $10,000 academic scholarships, and 32 finalists received scholarships worth $1,000. In Canada, four women are receiving $5,000 scholarships, and 13 finalists will be given $1,000 awards. Students in Australia, New Zealand, and Europe are also eligible for the Anita Borg scholarships, which were established in 2003. For more information on Google’s scholarship programs, click here.—Catherine Rampell

Yet another court decision questioned one of the Recording Industry Association of America’s main legal arguments in prosecuting alleged music pirates.

The RIAA argues that people who have made copyrighted music available for sharing have committed copyright infringement, whether or not the music was then illegally copied and downloaded by an unauthorized user. This argument was questioned in several recent conflicting court decisions. A judge this week in Atlantic v. Howell rejected the “making available” theory and denied the plaintiff’s motion for summary judgment. (There are other wrinkles in the case, too, such as whether the defendants intended to share the music or whether they did so accidentally.)

A bench trial for the self-represented defendants will likely...

Tech officials at colleges across the country say they’ve seen a spike in the number of complaints they’ve received from the Recording Industry Association of America. Each complaint says that a specific song or movie is being illegally traded by a computer user on a particular campus.

For instance, George Washington University usually receives five to 10 notices a week. In the past week alone, however, the university has received 123 notices. The messages come to colleges by e-mail, with the subject line “RIAA Infringement Notification.”

But an industry-group official told The Chronicle that the group has not changed its detection methods in any significant way. Are college students suddenly going on a downloading binge? Is something else going on? —Jeffrey R....

The Community College Open Textbook Project begins this week with a member meeting in California.

At the meeting, representatives of institutions around the country will start reviewing open-textbook models for “quality, usability, accessibility, and sustainability,” according to a news release. They will initially review four providers of free online educational resources: Connexions, run by Rice University; Flat World Knowledge, a commercial digital-textbook publisher that will begin offering free textbooks online next year; the University of California’s UC College Prep Online, which offers Advanced Placement and other courses online; and the

A professor and a curator at the University of Utah have created a Web site devoted to European dance, theater, and visual arts from 1600 to 1850. Called Dramatis Personae Archive, the site includes rare digitized books, maps, newspapers, and journals from the university’s J. Willard Marriott Library. The Web site grew out of a French-theater course taught by Christine A. Jones, a languages and literature professor. She teamed with Luise Poulton, a curator at the library, so her students could be exposed to rare dance books. Students in the class each posted to the Web site a summary on a book.

The course received an innovation award this year from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. —Andrea L. Foster

A professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law has created a nifty blog for students to hash out a debate about a fictional copyright-infringement case.

The blog, What Is Fair Use?, follows students’ arguments about whether the song “K Cera Cera,” created by former members of the band The KLF, infringed on “Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera),” a tune made famous by Doris Day. Students, all posting anonymously under the name “Friedman Advocates,” have linked to interesting copyright debates around the Web, as well as parodies, satires, and other controversies involving fair use. You can find

Eszter Hargittai, an assistant professor in Northwestern University’s sociology department, has discovered that students aren’t nearly as Web-savvy as they, or their elders, assume.

Ms. Hargittai studies the technological fluency of college freshmen. She found that they lack a basic understanding of such terms as BCC (blind copy on e-mail), podcasting, and phishing. This spring she will start a national poster-and-video contest to promote Web-related skills.

Q. Why do people think young people are so Web-wise?

A. I think the assumption is that if it was available from a young age for them, then they can use it better. Also, the people who tend to comment about technology use tend to be either academics or journalists or techies, and these three groups tend to understand some of these new developments better than the average...

Bridging its left and right brains, Carnegie Mellon University is starting a new music-technology program.

Carnegie Mellon is known for its strength in two disparate academic areas—fine arts and engineering. The music-technology program, which will teach students skills such as music-equipment design, will play to both strengths by culling courses from the College of Fine Arts, the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and the School of Computer Science. It will initially admit four undergraduate students and eight master’s students, according to The Tartan, the university’s student newspaper. —Catherine Rampell