John G. Palfrey ’94, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, said the Diebold suits put universities in the uncomfortable position of censoring their students to avoid serious legal action.

But Palfrey, who has been assisting Slater in his dealings with the University, said Diebold has erroneously claimed copyright protection for its documents.

“I think the problem here is that copyright law was not meant to stifle political speech,” Palfrey said.

Students and others who have posted the memoranda on their websites have claimed they are protected under the “fair use” exemption of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed by Congress in 1998.

A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins and Rice Universities this July, which examined source code allegedly used by Diebold, found gross inadequacies in the company’s election systems.

“Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts,” the researchers stated in their study.

Diebold subsequently claimed the study had looked at only part of the source code and that any glitches found have been fixed.

Rebecca T. Mercury, a research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government who has studied electronic voting systems for more than a decade, said students posting the Diebold memoranda on their websites only scratch the surface of alleged problems with the systems.

“I’d rather see people going to their government, the people who bought this stuff, and banging on their doors and saying, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’” Mercury said.