No Students Keelhauled: Naval Academy Slaps Downloader's Wrists

[JackSpratts]

RIAA more trouble than Saddam.

Eighty-five Naval Academy midshipmen were disciplined for using a military Internet connection to illegally trade copyrighted music and movies.

Officials stopped short of their threat to expel or court-martial the students, instead punishing the midshipmen with sanctions ranging from demerits and extra work to loss of privileges and leave, an academy document obtained by The (Baltimore) Sun showed.

Academy spokesman Cmdr. Bill Spann declined to comment Monday on why the school chose not to impose its harshest penalties, the newspaper reported.

The academy seized 92 student computers in a widely publicized raid in November on suspicions the students had used the academy's super-fast T3 Internet line to set up round-the clock Internet hubs to trade music and movies — a violation of Defense Department policy and federal copyright laws.

The academy was alerted to the problem when the Defense Research & Engineering Network, which supplies the Academy's Internet connection, found file trading was consuming an enormous share of the school's bandwidth — a measure of the volume of information a network can carry at one time.

A Pentagon spokesman, Glenn Flood, confirmed the broad outlines of that account.

AP

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Apr15.html

- js.