Shorter E-Leash for Bulldogs

Another sad day has come for our comrades down in New Haven. Yale University has adopted new policies to severely restrict students’ use of Kazaa, a popular Internet file-sharing program. By limiting Kazaa connections to snail-like speeds and employing a private eye to spy on students’ music preferences, Yale is moving ever closer to the closed-minded, medieval mood that its architecture does so much to create.

According to the Yale Daily News, Yale officals say the university has “hired an agent to identify illicit file sharing.” The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act is cited as the motivation behind this move, though the act only requires service providers to remove or block access to copyrighted information after receiving notification from the copyright’s owner. To top it off, Yale has reduced the maximum possible Kazaa connection speed to a slothly 50 kb per second, allowing students to download a sizeable movie over the course of about a week.

Alas, these seem only the most recent manifestations of Yale’s determination to close its students off from the world outside its gates. In 2000, caving to pressure from Metallica, Yale banned the once extremely popular but now unfortunately defunct Napster file-sharing system. Of course, when the world outside those gates is the veritable paradise of New Haven, Yale’s actions are somewhat more understandable.

Were old Eli truly worried about legitimate violations of basic standards of decency at its university, it would work to improve the quality of its students’ work, their lackluster social life, and of course the much-in-need-of-an-upgrade Yale football team.

All of these measures devoted to limiting students’ use of Kazaa almost amounts to a repressive police state—one which would work well in other parts of New Haven, but not in the university’s computer network.