"Since students know that the engineering department monitors the traffic as well as the server space, they don't use those accounts to download pirated music and video files," Gilbert says.
Nonetheless, it is incumbent upon specific departments that maintain sub-networks not managed by the university's central computing administration to maintain strict control over the access to those resources. "The sub-networks can invite abuse," Gilbert says.
Gilbert adds he has been at institutions where students use special, unmonitored sub-networks to set up businesses to store and distribute pirated music files. He says that while schools can clamp down on the illegal use of sub-networks, it's more difficult to monitor the data students are downloading to their privately owned computers through the campus's central network.
Monitoring worries civil liberties advocates, who say the free exchange of information is one of the basic principles of university life.
"What's going on here is an attempt of the recording industry and other copyright trade associations to turn higher education institutions into policing bodies," says Chris Hoofnagle of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group.
The entertainment industry disputes the charge leveled at them by civil liberties advocates.
"Exactly how universities do this is up to them," says Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, one of the organizations signing the letter to university presidents. "We certainly wouldn't be proposing that they invade anybody's privacy."
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