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October 23, 2008, 01:36 PM ET
Internet Bans Greet Illegal File Sharers at Bowling Green State U.
Students who share files illegally won’t be able to do so for long at Bowling Green State University.
This month the university started blocking the Internet connections of students caught downloading copyrighted files on peer-to-peer programs like Limewire, BitTorrent, and Gnutella, The BG News, the university’s student newspaper, reported this week. For first-time offenders, the suspension lasts 24 hours. For second and third violations, it increases to two weeks and the rest of the semester, respectively.
Bowling Green announced the new policy in e-mail messages and fliers, the campus paper said, but some students were taken aback by their Internet bans.
“Lots were upset and yelling obscenities at first, but now a lot have realized what they were doing was illegal and have removed the programs,” Jordan Jones, a computer consultant at the university, told the newspaper.
Technology officials hope the policy will serve as a deterrent. Last year Bowling Green received 658 cease-and-desist notices from the Recording Industry Association of America, and as of last week, a program called CopySense had flagged 191 computers on the campus network, according to Matt Haschak, the university’s director of information security. (CopySense works by matching digital signatures of copyrighted files to downloads on the campus network.)
Technology officials from various universities, meeting in Los Angeles this week for the annual Internet Entertainment Workshop, wondered why they should allow peer-to-peer programs on their networks at all, when they’re used mostly for Linux downloads, World of Warcraft updates, and illegal file sharing. —Sara Lipka
Categories: Campus-Piracy, Student-Life
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