Campus File Sharing Crackdown Continues

It’s hardly a pogrom, but apparently RIAA letters, threats, legal action and a “complaint” has spurred Penn State to take action against file sharers:

Penn State deprived 220 students of high-speed Internet connections in their dorms after it found they were sharing copyrighted material, the university said yesterday.

“Basically, we received a complaint,” said Penn State spokesman Tysen Kendig, who said he could not reveal who registered the complaint.

“Upon investigation, we found that the students had publicly listed copyright-infringing materials on their systems to other members of this network,” he added.

….”I was kind of surprised at being caught,” Jason Steiner, a freshman in aerospace engineering, told The Daily Collegian, Penn State’s student newspaper. “I was sitting there online, and all of a sudden I wasn’t, with no idea why.”

The sanctioned students all live in campus residence halls. They can still access their campus accounts from other computers.

The connections to their dorm rooms will be restored once the copyrighted materials have been removed, Kendig said.

On March 31, Penn State’s executive vice president and provost, Rodney Erickson, sent an e-mail to more than 110,000 students, administrators, faculty and staff reminding them that the university prohibits sharing copyrighted material and warning that such sharing is against the law.

Earlier this month, 85 students at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., were disciplined for using the school’s network to trade copyrighted music and movies. [AP]

The action appears more symbolic than anything, with the intent to have the offending material removed from the university system rather than punish the student offenders. The problem though, is that it begins a regime of inspections of the content within the system with clear privacy ramifications – where will this lead?