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Author: Carnevale, DanRead, Brock

IN AND OUT: In February about 3,500 applicants to the University of California at Berkeley's law school received an e-mail message suggesting that they had been accepted for the fall semester. A few blissful minutes later, they learned that the message was the product of an administrator's itchy trigger finger, not an admissions-office decision. Edward Tom, the law school's admissions director, was showing an employee how to use an e-mail program when he erred and sent the message â€" an invitation to an event for early-admission students â€" to a full roster of applicants instead of the 500 candidates who had actually been accepted.

DEAL DONE: Blackboard Inc.'s takeover of WebCT Inc. is now complete. The two education-software companies announced their completed merger last week after the markets closed, capping a $178-million cash deal. The combined company is expected to be a dominant force in the higher-education market.

DIGITAL VIDEO: The National Archives and Google have announced that they will work together to digitize historically important films from the archive's vaults. The videos â€" which include newsreels from World War II and documentaries produced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration â€" will soon be available at no cost to scholars and students.

SUED FOR SEARCHES: The Motion Picture Association of America has stepped up its campaign against digital-movie piracy, suing a number of Web sites that let users locate bootlegged films online. The sites, with names like IsoHunt, TorrentBox, and NiteShadow, don't actually distribute movie files. They are search engines, helping users sift through material made available on peer-to-peer services like BitTorrent and eDonkey. Legal experts say the new lawsuits indicate that the association is heading into uncharted territory: Whether indexing services can be sued for promoting piracy is not settled law.

STAYING IN THE U.S.A.: Reports of outsourcing in the information-technology marketplace have been greatly exaggerated, according to a new study released by the Association for Computing Machinery. The study predicts that, within the next decade, only 2 percent or 3 percent of technology jobs will be moved offshore â€" a small figure, authors say, compared with the number of jobs that American companies should be able to create. "The notion that information-technology jobs are disappearing is just nonsense," said Moshe Y. Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University who helped conduct the study, to The New York Times. "The data don't bear that out."

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By Dan Carnevale and Brock Read