College students who download music and movies from peer-to-peer file-sharing programs such as LimeWire and KaZaA will find themselves cut off when they return to campus this fall.
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Every college across the country must either have installed software to block illegal file-sharing or have created some other procedure for preventing it. The requirement is part of the 2008 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which took effect July 1.
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Some schools have been working to comply with the provisions for several years.
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Under the law, student violators face fines from $750 to $30,000 for each song or movie downloaded. If a court determines the infringement was willful, that fine can be as much as $250,000, although some judges have reduced higher fines, saying they’re unreasonable. Schools’ liability is limited if they cooperate with law enforcement.
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Campus punishments vary. The University of North Carolina Web site lists expulsion as a possible consequence. Vassar College requires first-time offenders to perform 20 hours of sanctioned service and pay a $25 fine. Second-time offenders face double the service requirements, double the fines and loss of Internet access, says spokesman Jeff Kosmacher.
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Most schools use commercial software on their networks to restrict downloads, says Gregory Jackson, vice president for policy analysis and advocacy at Educause, a non-profit that focuses on higher education and technology. Companies such as Red Lambda, based in Longwood, Fla., and Audible Magic in Los Gatos, Calif., automate a large portion of the process.
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These products look for file-sharing programs and block them. They shut down a user’s Web access for a period of time, and the user must remove the file-sharing program and any files that were downloaded before access is restored.
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But some schools, such as UCLA, have opted to find other ways of monitoring downloads. Using commercial software would violate the University of California’s privacy policy, say Steve…