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At the turn of the century, piracy was rampant on university campuses across America and beyond – with the arrival of high-speed internet, alongside file-sharing tools like Napster, Kazaa, LimeWire, and BitTorrent, fuelling a file-sharing craze among tech-savvy students.
In a bid to address this problem, the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) of 2008 introduced measures requiring institutions to implement policies and educate students about copyright infringement. Failure to comply with the federal law meant that establishments risked having their funding removed. The effectiveness of these warnings is debatable, of course. They might have inadvertently promoted piracy by informing less knowledgeable students about the existence of various file-sharing programs, but I digress.
Looking into the rules with modern eyes, TorrentFreak reports in 2024 many universities are still warning students of the perils of using file-sharing software that is no longer in use, at least not in any meaningful numbers.
Blasts from the past
The site singles out Boston University for providing an extensive list of nearly all defunct file-sharing applications, including Acquisition, Aimster, Ares, BearShare, Blubster, Direct Connect, eDonkey2000, Freewire, Gnucleus, Grokster, GTK-Gnutella, iMesh, Kazaa Lite, LimeWire, Morpheus, NeoNapster, Shareaza, WinMX, and XoLoX.
Stanford University’s Peer-to-Peer Traffic Advisory, last updated on March 6, 2024, is similarly behind the times, warning that Skype and World of Warcraft could trigger file-sharing-related alerts. Stanford notes, “Skype transmits phone calls over the Internet using software based on the KaZaa file-sharing protocol,” and “World of Warcraft uses the BitTorrent protocol to distribute software patches.”
While these various names from the past might evoke nostalgia for Millennials, today’s students are likely unfamiliar with the vast variety of these programs, preferring to use the likes of BitTorrent, Dropbox, and Google Drive for their file-sharing needs, or any of the many file-hosting and sharing services out there.
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