The article’s title itself is highly disturbing: “Scan to notify illegal sharers.” There’s an assumption being made somewhere that all peer-to-peer transfers are illegal…

The scan is performed by a Network Access Control client which must be installed by students in order to access the web while in residential halls. This client currently checks to see if the user has an antivirus program and firewall installed and running, and that the student’s OS is up-to-date. If the student’s machine fails any of these checks, their machine is “quarantined,” and they cannot browse the web until they address the problems.

While they were testing the NAC client, there was an intermediary step where they would notify students of problems, but not quarantine them yet.

None of this information is stated in our residential broadband terms of use. Does anyone know if this is legal or not?

The problem is that the students get caught, not that filesharing is occurring. Maybe the universities should enforce some blocklists containing the various anti-P2P organizations at the university-wide level. It’s an easy step that would help with the DMCA notice problem. If the university has additional problems, like excessive network usage, just throttle the bandwidth.