At the turn of the century, piracy was rampant on college campuses in America and beyond. The advent of high-speed Internet and file-sharing tools such as Napster, Kazaa, LimeWire, and BitTorrent created a craze among tech-savvy students.
To address this problem, the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) of 2008 introduced measures requiring institutions to implement policies and notify students about copyright infringement. Failure to comply with the federal law meant that institutions risked having their funding pulled. The effectiveness of these warnings is, of course, debatable. They may have inadvertently encouraged piracy by informing less-informed students of the existence of various file-sharing programs, but I digress.
If you look at the rules with modern eyes, TorrentFreak 2024 Reports: Many universities are still warning students about the dangers of using file-sharing software that is no longer used, at least not in significant numbers.
Explosions from the past
The website cites Boston University as the source of 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 March 6, 2024, is also behind the times, warning that Skype and World of Warcraft could trigger warnings regarding file sharing. Stanford notes, “Skype transmits voice 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 may sound nostalgic to Millennials, today’s students are probably unfamiliar with the wide variety of these programs. For file sharing, they prefer programs like BitTorrent, Dropbox, and Google Drive, or one of the many other file hosting and sharing services.