Derek A. Slater ’05 is in trouble with Harvard for sharing copyrighted material.

But he’s not accused of using Kazaa, Morpheus or their music industry-defying close cousins.

In fact, his copyright infringement woes don’t even involve music.

Rather, Slater received a cease-and-desist letter from Harvard on Oct. 31 after posting thousands of internal documents about an electronic voting machine manufacturer on his Harvard-hosted website.

The memos, which are widely available on the Internet, discuss software and security flaws in Diebold Election Systems’ 33,000 machines across the country.

Diebold has claimed that the posting the documents—which were stolen by a hacker in March 2003—is a copyright violation.

Slater said the University has disabled online access to the documents.

And Slater says he will now have to convince the University that he has not violated Diebold’s copyright or risk having a copyright violation on his student record—two of which will result in the loss of University network access for a year.

In its fight to have the documents taken off the Internet, Diebold is citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, which has been used most prominently against music sharers.

The DMCA treats universities as Internet service providers, and thus requires them to act in cases of possible copyright infringement or risk liability, said John G. Palfrey ’94, the executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

Swarthmore and MIT have also removed the Diebold documents from websites of electronic voting advocates at their institutions.

Slater said he obtained the documents from a page maintained by Swarthmore College students.

“These documents are potentially important to our democracy and the integrity of our voting system,” he said. “It’s necessary to spur debate.”

But Diebold spokesperson David Bear said his company has the right to protect its own documents.

“We reserve the right to protect that which we feel is proprietary,” Bear told The New York Times last week.