On October 18, 1999, administrators at Carnegie Mellon University conducted an unannounced search of 250 student files located on the University's Intranet. The random search included only those files that were unprotected by a password or were protected by a password that was made available to the public. The search uncovered that 71 students were illegally hosting copyrighted MP3s and as a result the University canceled the in-room Internet access of these 71 students.

The Carnegie Mellon University administration acted after receiving numerous warnings from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) that students were using the University Intranet connections to commit copyright infringement. The student files were originally detected by the RIAA through its utilization of an automated Web crawler that monitors the Internet for piracy.

As one of the country's leading technical institutes, Carnegie Mellon has attempted to position itself at the forefront of the growing wave of colleges and universities that are actively cooperating with the RIAA to reduce and prevent piracy on the Internet. Carnegie Mellon was one of the first universities to enroll in a new initiative of the RIAA's anti-piracy program, dubbed "Soundbyting." This program provides university administrators with a kit of core materials to serve as a framework for discussion of music and the Internet. The Soundbyting materials seek to aid administrators in their formulation of an adequate policy on intellectual property. The materials also seek to aid administrators in raising awareness among students that reproducing and distributing copyrighted music on the Internet without permission is a form of theft that has both serious ethical and legal consequences.

In addition to the mounting pressure applied to universities by organizations like the RIAA, Congress recently weighed in on the issue of Internet piracy with its passage of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. So long as an Internet Service Provider takes action when alerted to the presence of infringement, the DMCA provides ISPs with a safe harbor from liability based on the copyright infringements of their subscribers. As other wired colleges and universities assess their potential liability for copyright infringements carried out by students using university Intranet connections, we may see more enforcement actions like the Carnegie Mellon raid.