One of the Recording Industry Association of America’s most symbolically important legal victories—its first and only win over a piracy suspect in a jury trial—is on the line today in a Minnesota courtroom, according to Wired‘s Threat Level blog.

Ten months ago a Duluth jury ordered alleged song swapper Jammie Thomas to pay $222,000 for sharing 24 copyrighted songs. The victory legitimized the RIAA’s legal strategy of pursuing individual file-sharing suspects, and it seemed likely to dissuade some other defendants from bringing their cases to court.

But in May, Michael Davis, the district-court judge who heard the civil case, raised the possibility of a mistrial. Mr. Davis said he may have erred in telling the jury that Ms. Thomas was liable for copyright infringement as long as she was “making copyrighted sound recordings available” on KaZaA, no matter if the RIAA could prove that other...

The Chronicle‘s Goldie Blumenstyk has covered distance education for more than a decade, and during that time she’s written stories about the economics of for-profit education, the ways that online institutions market themselves, and the demise of the 50-percent rule. About the only thing she hadn’t done, it seemed, was to take a course from an online university.

But this spring she finally took the plunge, and now she has completed a class in government and nonprofit accounting through the University of Phoenix. She shares tales from the cyber-classroom — and her final grade — in a podcast with Paul Fain, a Chronicle reporter.

A person or animal afflicted with “learned helplessness,” Wikipedia helpfully tells us, “has come to believe that it has no control over its situation and that whatever it does is futile. As a result, the human being or the animal will stay passive in the face of an unpleasant, harmful or damaging situation, even when it does actually have the power to change its circumstances.”

Professors who say they can’t get technology to work the way they want it to might know this feeling all too well. In the latest edition of Tech Therapy, Warren Arbogast, a technology consultant, and Scott Carlson, a Chronicle reporter, talk about the “learned helplessness” that pervades technology use on campus.

If you can’t beat Google — and let’s face it, you probably can’t — you might as well join forces with the company, at least when it comes to the e-mail business. Arizona State University recently switched to Gmail, and the institution hasn’t looked back, according to Adrian Sannier, the university technology officer.

Should your college outsource its e-mail service? Can other IT services be handed off to outside companies?

In his appearance on this week’s Tech Therapy, Mr. Sannier talks with Scott Carlson, a Chronicle reporter, and Warren Arbogast, a technology consultant, about the benefits and perils of outsourcing.

In 2005, when the Motion Picture Association of America stepped up its campaign against college movie pirates, officials with the trade group said that 44 percent of the film industry’s domestic losses were the result of illegal downloads on campus networks.

That statistic — which came from a report by a research firm called L.E.K. — was certainly striking. But it was also wrong, MPAA officials now say. According to the Associated Press, a “human error” compromised the study: In fact, the MPAA says, just 15 percent of the movie industry’s domestic losses can be attributed to campus piracy.

Although its revised numbers are rather less impressive than the old ones, the trade group says campus downloading is still a significant problem. (The L.E.K. study also concluded that U.S. movie studios lose over $6-billion a year to piracy, and MPAA officials say they have found no reason to doubt that...

Earlier this year Facebook removed one of its few academic-minded features — a tool that let college students list which courses they were taking. Some users might have taken that removal as a sign that the social-network was moving ever further away from its collegiate roots. But in fact, Facebook officials simply hoped that someone would build a better course-management application than they had.

A company named Inigral thinks it’s done just that: Its designers have built an application, called Courses, that lets students use Facebook to track down classmates, share notes, start discussion groups, and keep track of their coursework.

Sounds promising, right? Well, there’s something of a catch. Now that Facebook has opened up its pages to independent software developers, there are plenty of course-listing applications like this one floating around. And none of those tools seem especially...

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, told educators last year that students shouldn’t cite his sprawling Web site: “For God’s sake, you’re in college,” he said. “Don’t cite the encyclopedia.”

It’s a safe bet that most professors agreed with that assessment. But according to BBC News, Mr. Wales has now modified his message. He told attendees at a London IT conference this week that he doesn’t object to Wikipedia citations, although he admitted that scholars would “probably be better off doing their own research.”

From the BBC report, it’s hard to tell how gung-ho Mr. Wales is about Wikipedia’s academic value. But the online encyclopedia’s efforts to improve the quality of its articles might be starting to pay dividends: A German magazine recently compared 50 Wikipedia articles with similar pieces in Brockhaus, a commercial encyclopedia. According to the study, the Wikipedia articles were...

With winter breaks bearing down, the Recording Industry Association of America has sent out its monthly batch of pre-litigation notices a bit early this December. (The letters typically reach campus in boxes in the middle of every month.)

In this batch, the trade group asks 22 colleges to pass out-of-court settlement offers on to 396 students accused of pirating music. The institutions receiving the notices are Auburn, Brandeis, Indiana State, Iowa State, Louisiana Tech, Mississippi State, Morehead State, and Western Kentucky Universities; Gustavus Adolphus and Ithaca Colleges; the Universities of Arizona, Dayton, Rochester, Southern California, and Washington; the Georgia and Rochester Institutes of Technology; the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis; and the University of California’s Davis, San Diego, and Santa Cruz campuses....

Colleges are already broadcasting campus news and emergency bulletins to students’ cellphones. So why not try and teach some courses over the devices too?

Truth be told, there are plenty of reasons not to do that. Cellphones are hardly ideal vehicles for most course material, and there’s no reason to believe that students actually want course work to impinge upon text messaging (or vice versa). But that hasn’t stopped Cyber University, a Japanese distance-ed institution, from offering what may be the world’s first cellphone-based college course.

The course — which surveys the mysteries of the pyramids, according to the Associated Press — will be delivered through a series of recorded lectures, which are accompanied by PowerPoint images that fill up tiny phone screens.

If this all sounds like an attention-getting gimmick, well, that’s basically what it is. Enrollment is open to the public, ...

The Web may be about to get a whole lot slower. The folks at Nemertes Research, a technology-research firm, certainly think so. They predict that demand for bandwidth will outpace capacity by 2010.

There’s no question that streaming video, file-sharing services, and other bandwidth hogs have placed serious demands on the Internet’s infrastructure. According to the Nemertes study, the increase in bandwidth use will dwarf current plans to bolster network capacity, unless cable and phone companies and wireless providers invest up to $55-billion in iimprovements.

USA Today notes that the Internet Innovation Alliance, a coalition of businesses and nonprofit groups that support tax and spending policies to encourage investing in Web capacity, has backed the study.

But therein lies the rub, according to Broadband Reports. Fears of “a looming bandwidth apocalypse” have been stoked by companies...