Superior officers at the U.S. Naval Academy punished 85 naval cadets for using the Academy’s high-speed Internet access to download copyrighted songs and movies.
In November of 2002, 92 students’ computers were seized after it was determined that the computers were used to pirate files. All but seven of those students were punished.
The Academy has not made known exactly how the cadets were punished. The Academy cites privacy rules, but the students’ punishment did stop short of expulsion or court-martial.
The students’ punishment comes after a Pentagon official allegedly threatened to cut the Academy’s broadband access to the Defense Research and Engineering Network used by other military branches for scientific and other important research if it didn’t do something to deter file sharing.
A recent wave of efforts by the Recording Industry Association of American and Motion Picture Association of America to curb sharing of copyrighted movies and songs includes writing e-mails to various universities telling them to turn over file-sharing network users or face lawsuits.
Brian Rust, senior administrator and spokesman for the University of Wisconsin’s Division of Information Technology, said that corporations holding copyrighted recordings and movies have just started to speak out in the last month or so.
“We’ve probably received about a hundred notices from Universal Studios asking certain users to cease and desist of file sharing for movies, just in the last month or two,” Rust said. “So we forward the notices to the users and attach our appropriate use policy to the e-mail, and that’s it. We assume that the notified people stop.”
Even though the “vast majority” of those who are notified that they are pirating copyrighted material are students, there are some offenders that are faculty and staff.
In the meantime, one of the jobs of DoIT is to make users of the dormitory Internet server Resnet and other UW server users aware that piracy is illegal and against the appropriate use policy.
“We try to keep students, faculty and staff aware of the appropriate use policy,” Rust said.
Penn State University booted off 220 students last week for using high-speed Internet in their dorms for illegal file sharing. After the university was notified by an unregistered complaint, PSU sent out warnings three weeks before the students were kicked offline. The students, all of who are residents of university housing, would be given access again if they remove the copyright infringing materials from their machines.
Even though some think this is punishment enough, many media executives and congressmen like Ed Towns, D-New York, and Bob Goodlatte, R-Virginia, don’t feel that this is enough. What Goodlatte calls the “war on piracy,” he urges legislative action to fight illegal file sharing, which should include consumer education, industry cooperation and law enforcement.
Karoline Kreuser, a sophomore at UW, isn’t worried about consequences she and her fellow students might incur from piracy.
“I’ve never been worried,” Kreuser said. “I don’t think our university would punish people like that, maybe others are more strict, but not here.”
Rust, however, disagrees.
“We have a couple security people to make sure we follow through on the notices sent to users,” Rust said.
Although UW has not had to deal out any punishment for any homegrown pirates yet, Rust assured that there would be action taken against violators.
“It would go to the Dean of Students’ office,” Rust said. “I’m sure there would be severer circumstances.”
