A program called cGrid took center stage at a hearing held by the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee on Thursday — the latest in a series of meetings convened by the committee to examine possible solutions to online music piracy on college campuses.

The software, originally known as Icarus, was designed about three years ago by computing officials at the University of Florida. But now a company called Red Lambda has developed cGrid for commercial release, and record-company executives are bullish about the program: After all, it can automatically kick students off the Internet if they are caught connecting to peer-to-peer networks.

Some college officials say cGrid isn’t yet ready for prime time, either because it could block some legitimate peer-to-peer transactions or because it doesn’t catch enough music pirates. But Gregory J. Marchwinski, president and chief executive officer of Red Lambda, argued at the hearing that the software posed no threat to academic freedom. And he said that cGrid could stop students from swapping songs on “darknets” — underground local networks that are not connected to the wider Web. (Some students at Florida have said they use darknets to get around the software’s filtering system.)

Cary H. Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, used the hearing to encourage college officials to “strongly consider” trying cGrid. But the higher-education representatives on hand were reluctant to give the program a full-throated endorsement.

John C. Vaughn, executive vice president of the Association of American Universities, said many colleges consider antipiracy tools like cGrid to be prohibitively expensive. And he all but begged lawmakers to refrain from putting too much pressure on campus administrators, saying he knew of “no sector that has put more time, money, and effort into combating illegal file sharing than has higher education.”

To drive home his point, Mr. Vaughn listed several new steps colleges were taking to fight song swapping without resorting to network-filtering tools. A new college consortium will work with technology companies to design academe-friendly antipiracy tools, he said, and campus lawyers and IT officials will help recording-industry officials tweak the RIAA’s orientation video about copyright infringement.

But those efforts left some lawmakers unsatisfied. Deep into the hearing’s question-and-answer session, Rep. Ric Keller, a Republican from Florida, sounded an ominous note. Accusing colleges of using academic freedom and privacy as “excuses” to avoid purchasing software like cGrid, he issued a pointed (if unspecific) warning: “I would say the hammer’s coming.” —Brock Read