In 2003, Maryland received more than 900 of the notices, and other schools report being deluged with similarly large volumes. Whitman said American University officials went through stretches in 2003 when they received more than 30 notices every day.
The notices don't identify students by name, but rather by the unique Internet protocol (IP) number issued to each student by the school.
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When Maryland receives one of the notices, its information technology office immediately orders the student to remove the offending material from his or her computer. If the student doesn't comply within 24 hours, the office kills the student's connection until the infringing copies are purged, said Amy Ginther, director of the university's NEThics project.
The office doesn't punt first offenders to the campus judicial system, but does warn them about the risks of file swapping. Ginther said officials advise students that the same entertainment company that sent the takedown notice could just as easily have sued them. She said they also tell students that the typical settlement for such a lawsuit is around $3,000.
Two-time offenders earn a trip to the residence hall judicial office and a new "judicial record," which acts as a kind of probation notice, said Chris Taylor, who runs the office. The judicial record compounds the punishment for any other violation of campus rules, Taylor said. No student at Maryland has ever committed a third offense, but third offenders would lose their network connections for at least some length of time, and could lose their residence hall berths altogether, Taylor said.
Other schools have a similarly tiered punishment system. At the University of Virginia second offenders must pay a $100 reconnection fee before they can get back online. Such deterrents are apparently having the desired effect. Since Virginia installed the tiered system last year, "only one person committed a second offense and nobody committed a third offense," said Shirley Payne, the school's director for security coordination and policy.
Look Out Honey, Cause I'm Using Technology
Colleges can automate their network policing activities to some extent with technological tools that allow them to "shape" the usage of their bandwidth. Bandwidth-shaping technology provided by companies like Packeteer, LogicSense and Sandvine Inc. allows university network operators to limit the amount of network capacity any one student can use, and to de-prioritize certain suspicious types of network traffic.
Controlling how much bandwidth a single student can devour is as much about preserving resources for the schools as it is about complying with copyright law, officials said. "We did find a couple years ago that the residence halls were just eating up bandwidth," said Anne Agee, the deputy chief information officer at George Mason. Agee's office now monitors residence hall bandwidth consumption for unusual spikes.
George Mason also starts all of its newly connected students in a computer "safe" mode that doesn't allow them to share files. The students can turn that mode off, but Agee said it acts as another barrier to illegal activity.
Whitman said American University invested in rate-limiting technology to ratchet down the amount of file transfers students can initiate, but he also noted that companies like Sharman Networks -- the Vanuatu-based company that owns the Kazaa file-swapping program -- are constantly retooling their technology to trick systems designed to reign it in.
