Students will download songs and movies one way or another, so part of deterring piracy is offering free, legal resources. But now a go-to option for many colleges, Ruckus, has dropped out of the dwindling business.

“Unfortunately the Ruckus service will no longer be provided,” says a message that reportedly replaced Ruckus’s Web site on Friday evening. “Thanks.”

The Chronicle’s calls to the company’s headquarters, in Herndon, Va., were not immediately returned on Monday.

Colleges began signing up for Ruckus five years ago, and in 2005, almost one in five was considering a subscription to a music or movie service, according to a survey by the education-technology group Educause. At first Ruckus charged for campuswide access, but by 2006 it had shifted its focus from site licenses to advertising, still requiring colleges to sign deals, but not to pay.

Record-company...

The Recording Industry Association of America announced in December that it was shifting gears and would stop suing groups of students for alleged illegal file sharing. So what is it doing now?

For starters, the industry group is pulling back from pending cases. In many lawsuits that recording companies filed against anonymous students — “John Does” — legal hurdles and universities’ challenges inhibited identification of those defendants.

“We are by and large dismissing all John Doe cases where we have not received a discovery order or a subpoena response,” Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the RIAA, said in an e-mail interview. “Of course, there are some exceptions,” she said, without naming which ones.

Music companies have already abandoned lawsuits against students at North Carolina State University, Rhode Island College, and the University of Michigan, the popular blog ...

A federal judge ruled today that Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society can broadcast online a hearing in a recording-industry lawsuit scheduled for January 22.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment is suing Joel Tenenbaum, a graduate student at Boston University, for alleged copyright infringement. Charles R. Nesson, a Harvard law professor representing Mr. Tenenbaum, had filed a motion last month to “admit the Internet into the courtroom.”

Today’s ruling goes beyond simply approving that request.

“The public benefit of offering a more complete view of these proceedings is plain, especially via a medium so carefully attuned to the Internet Generation captivated by these file-sharing lawsuits,” Judge Nancy Gertner wrote. “‘Public’ today has a new resonance, especially in this case.”

Sony had opposed the Internet broadcast, arguing in court documents that the...

Students don’t research like they used to. And they have a hard time evaluating the credibility of information they find, both in print and online. At least that’s what two instructors at Mesa Community College saw in their courses. So the instructors, Rochelle L. Rodrigo and Susan K. Miller-Cochran, who is now an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University, wrote The Wadsworth Guide to Research, published this year by Cengage Learning. In November they presented some of their teaching strategies at the New Media Consortium’s Rock the Academy symposium, in Second Life.

Ms. Miller-Cochran talked to The Chronicle about how to help students determine when a source is reliable.

Q. What gave you the sense that students needed help?

A. If you look at most textbooks for writing courses now, they tend to teach students to categorize sources in one of two way...

The Recording Industry Association of America, which announced last month that it would stop suing groups of students for alleged illegal file sharing, has ditched the company it had hired to seek out such pirates.

That company, MediaSentry, had collected evidence for the RIAA’s mass lawsuits by using the LimeWire program to search for copyrighted song titles. But the industry group quietly ended its relationship with MediaSentry several months ago, for reasons it did not disclose, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

In any case, the move represents a “victory” against a company that had been “invading the privacy of people,” Ray Beckerman, a lawyer in New York who writes the popular blog Recording Industry vs. the People, told The Journal.

The RIAA still plans to look out for copyright infringement and file lawsuits in egregious cases. But instead of MediaSentry, the...

The fracas over file sharing has prompted many proposals, but no grand solution. This semester, in a freshman seminar called Stealing in Music City, U.S.A., students at Vanderbilt University sketched out their own model of music distribution.

Lawyers, recording-industry executives, songwriters, and performers spoke to the students, and education became a critical component of their new music-world order. One student said that federal legislation — a la No Child Left Behind — should require copyright law to be taught in public schools.

The government should be more involved over all, the students decided (a video of their hourlong final presentation is on YouTube). Their proposals included federal regulation of digital-rights management, as well as two options for peer-to-peer networks: Either the government would run a neutral, nonprofit network, or network owners would be required ...

New regulations concerning student privacy that were released last week by the U.S. Department of Education take up technology in ways that the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act never has before.

“A major reason for these new rules was to try to catch up Ferpa” — as the law is known — “with modern times,” says Rodney J. Petersen, a policy analyst for the higher-education-technology group Educause.

The Education Department’s proposed regulations sparked lively debates about privacy: One of technology officials’ main challenges was to explain the distinction between Social Security numbers and student-identification numbers.

In the proposed rules, neither could be included in colleges’ directories. And that change — treating ID numbers just like Social Security numbers — would have been tricky (and expensive), requiring many colleges to retrofit information systems. ...

Here’s a new way for colleges to skirt takedown notices and lawsuits for students’ alleged piracy: charge all of them a flat rate and cede the levy to the music industry.

Warner Music Group is in talks with several universities about this experiment in “voluntary blanket licensing,” said a post last week on the blog Techdirt. Colleges would collect the money, and the recording industry, through a nonprofit organization, would distribute it to artists, according to a slideshow presentation embedded in the Techdirt post.

The blanket license, the presentation says, is similar to current models for radio and television. But all universities and Internet service providers would have to sign on, it says, for the plan to work. Techdirt didn’t like the sound of that.

“So, basically, it’s not voluntary at all,” the blog said. “It’s either join, or get saddled with significant limitations. ...

The big, long file-sharing case known as London-Sire v. Does 1-4 — for anonymous students at Boston University — isn’t going well for the music industry.

A federal judge in Massachusetts, Nancy Gertner, yesterday quashed the industry’s subpoenas seeking information about three of the many defendants in the case. The reason? “The university,” the court order said, “has adequately demonstrated that it is not able to identify the alleged infringers with a reasonable degree of technical certainty.”

Colleges and universities have taken different approaches to the recording industry’s anti-piracy campaign. But this victory — the judge’s response to the university’s “motion to quash” — has staggering implications, said an article on p2pnet.

“This suggests any university, or any other entity the Big 4 [record companies] are trying to terrorize and which can’t absolutely name a potential...

Colleges have taken different approaches to the recording industry’s anti-piracy campaign. Some have begun quickly erasing network-access logs, or refused to forward the industry’s settlement demands to students, or fought the industry’s subpoenas. Others have taken a different tack, trying to deter students from illegal file sharing by limiting their bandwidth, barring peer-to-peer programs from campus networks, stepping up education programs, promoting legal options like Napster or Ruckus, or seeking out pirates and blocking their Internet connections.

But students still pay to settle would-be lawsuits by the Recording Industry Association of America, and that financial hit may mean they have to drop out of college, said Jodi Thesing-Ritter, associate dean of student development at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire.

Ms. Thesing-Ritter mentioned dropouts in a recent...