Common sense, for once, has prevailed. For whatever reason Boston College was telling its students that using a wireless router could be considered a “common example of copyright infringement.” Word got out, the Internet complained, and now the offending bullet point has been removed.
The note was spotted on the college’s information technology services Web site, and was intended to warn students of the dangers of copyright infringement. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but linking wireless router use to copyright infringement, as if buying the latest Linksys or Netgear automatically makes you a criminal, was clearly pretty silly.
The warning had noted that by using a wireless router you could possibly be opening yourself up to evil roommates who’d like to do nothing more than torrent movies all day long, possibly putting you, the owner of said router, in grave danger.
That bullet point has since been removed, and what remains are fairly benign warnings (sharing MP3 files across the Internet could constitute copyright infringement, and so forth).