"The message was delivered loud and clear" — and that message, according to Mr. von Lohmann, was: "You fail to address our concerns at your peril."

....some who study copyright law and technology worry that Mr. Spanier is accommodating the entertainment industry too much and proposing policies that could have a detrimental effect on higher education and the Internet.

The pressure by the entertainment industry on colleges is "part of a much larger strategy" to force commercial Internet-service providers to monitor traffic, filter infringement, and terminate subscribers, says Mr. von Lohmann, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "A victory on the university level will no doubt be used as a precedent."

What's more, he says, Penn State's administrators are misreading the Digital Millennium Copyright Act if they think the university should start monitoring the network. The law "very clearly states that there is no requirement to monitor," he says.

....Moves at Penn State and other colleges to shut down certain types of file sharing blatantly defy academic and intellectual freedom, [Siva Vaidhyanathan] says. To replace existing file sharing with a licensed service glosses over a copyright issue that hasn't been sufficiently explored in court. If the entertainment industry has a problem with a user, it should be the industry's responsibility to sue.

"I would love it if the industries came to sue me," Mr. Vaidhyanathan says.

"I've got several thousand MP3s sitting in a file open to the whole world through Gnutella. If they think that is a copyright violation, if they want to show that I came upon those files illegally, then let's have that out." [Chronicle of Higher Education] The blanket license is an excellent idea, and the concentrated intranets of universities and colleges a great place to test such a system out for more widespread application. I agree with Vaidhyanathan and von Lohman that system monitoring is a huge mistake, one not in the best interests of students, universities, the Internet or the legal status of copyright in America.

Log on to the chat next week and let Spanier know how you feel about the matter.