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August 20, 2007, 03:43 PM ET
Berkeley Promises to Give File Swappers the Boot
Several colleges have tried turning copyright-infringement notices into “teachable moments”: When officials are told by the entertainment industry that a student has been downloading copyrighted material, they’ll cut that student’s Internet connection until he or she has read the campus computing policy, say, or completed a computing-ethics quiz.
The University of California at Berkeley is taking a tougher approach. Under a new campus policy, students who are identified in copyright complaints will now have their dorm-room computers automatically booted offline for a week. Repeat offenders will have their Internet connections shut down for a month.
The policy was designed, in part, to convince Congress that the university is taking file sharing seriously, according to Dedra Chamberlin, Berkeley’s manager of residential computing services.
But it will also give students an awfully stern lesson. “We want to make it painful so students really take this seriously,” Ms. Chamberlin told the Contra Costa Times, “but we don’t want to hamper their ability to get their academic work done.” —Brock Read
Categories: Campus-Piracy
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