With one bold stroke last week, the Naval Academy became a leader in the battle against college students who illegally swap music and movies over the Internet.
But its decision to seize the computers of nearly 100 midshipmen Thursday was not a calculated reach for national prominence on the issue, experts and people familiar with the academy said yesterday.
Instead, they said, it reflected the higher level of control the military college commands over a wide range of student conduct, from the neatness of dorm rooms to the proper way to salute a senior officer.
"The point that keeps getting missed in all these articles is that this is the Naval Academy," said Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel of the American Council on Education, a Washington group that represents 1,800 colleges and universities, including the U.S. military academies.
"Students have voluntarily signed up for a conduct code that is more stringent than one would see at a public or private university in this country."
When the academy last summer banned students from chanting "Kill!" it didn't make national headlines. But with its move to seize the computers of midshipmen suspected of illegally downloading copyright material, the academy landed with a splash in a debate over how far universities should go to police students' use of the Internet.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is regarded as having one of the toughest policies on Internet piracy. In 1998, a student was expelled. Each year, about 60 first-time offenders are disconnected from the university network and reprimanded in a compulsory meeting with school officials. But the school has never resorted to taking away a computer as part of an investigation, said Jeanne Smythe, the university's director for computer policy.
"In general, we try to respect people's privacy," she said. But like several other education officials interviewed yesterday, she said that the expectations of privacy are different at a military academy.
"We don't do room inspections, either," she said.
Academy officials confiscated the computers from dorm rooms while students were in class Thursday. The seizures were the most aggressive response by an American college or university to concerns that students are going online to download pirated music and movies they haven't paid for.
The action occurred a month after four entertainment industry trade groups mailed letters to 2,300 college and universities asking for a crackdown.
