Three major recording companies - EMI, Sony, and Festival - have agreements to scan computers at the Universities of Sydney and Tasmania for sound files to gather copyright infringement evidence. They also want the same deal at the University of Melbourne.
The deals with Sydney and Tasmania agree only that the two campuses will preserve the files as evidence but not hand the information over to the companies, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. The Melbourne campus is resisting the record companies so far, saying it already warned a pair of students about online music file swapping and disabled the appropriate links from their personal Web pages.
Tony Bannon, a counselor for the three companies, told the Herald industry studies showed universities and public libraries are "the biggest repositories" of unauthorized music swapping files, helping to make for an 8.9 percent loss in sales over the past year. He argued the companies should get email account access, because emails with MP3 attachments would prove copying and swapping had happened, adding one student had about five hundred MP3 files.
For a related story, click here.
