With the recording industry cracking down harder nationally on file sharing users, Eastern students are being warned about the dangers of file sharing.

The university and Information Technology Services are taking precautions to hinder and slow down file sharing.

“ITS, in partnership with Housing and Dining Services, is doing its part in educating students about ills of file sharing and the deleterious effects it has on the network,” said Chat Chatterji, an ITS vice president.

The music industry sued 261 people Monday for swapping.

ITS and housing services have posted flyers in labs and dorms and have asked Resident Assistants to spread the word, said Chatterji. The posters state warnings about file sharing.

Mark Hudson, director of Housing and Dining, said many students don’t know they are file sharing. Many people using music file sharing programs don’t read the policy and just click the ‘I accept’ button.

File sharing slows down the network, Hudson said.

“Our network usage shows there are still a lot of individuals engaged in music and file downloading,” Chatterji said. Eastern’s network equipment is set up to not prioritize file sharing. Equipment is installed on the network which constrains the amount of bandwidth that can be used for this activity.

There is low priority assigned to downloading and high priority to e-mail, Web traffic and messaging, he said. They have also set this equipment to not allow much, if any, uploading. Uploading mostly from university networks is what the Record Industry Association of America pays attention to.

Eastern has not received notices from record companies and movie studios complaining about copyright violations, Chatterji said. Although many other universities have received such letters.

Northern Illinois University in DeKalb has received hundreds in the past two years, said Jason Richardson, ITS security manager. Northern has published a pamphlet for students and made it available to the resident halls.

The pamphlet explains what file sharing is, the dangers of file sharing and how to prevent those dangers,Richardson said. Warnings were published in the school newspaper, (italics)The Northern Star (italics), as advertisements.

Richardson said complaints from the music industry is substantially less from the past two years. The music industry would send a list of names of students sharing files. The university would determine the name of the student, he said. They were required to come in and have a sit down face to face meeting with faculty members.

The students were to read a policy and sign a waiver stating they would stop using file sharing programs, he said.

After two viruses disabled Eastern’s network in late August, Chatterji previously predicted a third virus would hit Wednesday. He said he thought it was a hoax Wednesday.