At the turn of the century, piracy was rampant on university campuses across America and beyond - with the arrival of high-speed internet, alongside file-sharing tools like Napster, Kazaa, LimeWire, and BitTorrent, fuelling a file-sharing craze among tech-savvy students.
In a bid to address this problem, the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) of 2008 introduced measures requiring institutions to implement policies and educate students about copyright infringement. Failure to comply with the federal law meant that establishments risked having their funding removed. The effectiveness of these warnings is debatable, of course. They might have inadvertently promoted piracy by informing less knowledgeable students about the existence of various file-sharing programs, but I digress.
