The Naval Academy has cracked down hard, on P2P file-sharers - most other colleges have not. For now, the RIAA seems committed to its PR-disaster rear guard campaign to go after nodes of users. Scott Carlson writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The recording industry plans to increase the number of complaints it lodges with colleges when it believes students are using file-sharing programs in violation of copyright law, an entertainment-industry official said last week.

Cary H. Sherman, president and general counsel of the Recording Industry Association of America, announced the new push in an e-mail message to the president of Pennsylvania State University at University Park, Graham B. Spanier.

The message preceded the first meeting of a committee of recording-industry representatives and university administrators. The committee's members will be trying to hammer out differences on copyright law and develop ways to deter illegal file sharing through peer-to-peer, or "P2P," networks and other means.

In his note, Mr. Sherman said that CD sales had dropped because of piracy and that with the arrival of the "critical holiday retail season," colleges and universities would be likely to receive more copyright-infringement notices from his group.

"Until now," he wrote, "we've been somewhat circumspect in the number of notices we send and to date have sent a relatively small number of P2P-related notices compared to the large number of infringements we're finding, but we no longer feel that we can afford the luxury of ignoring infringements."

At the end of the note, Mr. Sherman encouraged Mr. Spanier to "feel free to forward this information to anyone else in the university community."

When a policy fails, ther choices are to retreat, regroup and formulate new policy, or press on ahead with ever more vigor pretending that the failure is not of conception but of slack execution. The RIAA has chosen the latter - pity.