Starting at 8 a.m. Monday, Vanderbilt University will block Internet traffic from three programs used to download everything from pirated music to pornography to full-length movies after finding that such activity consumes more than a third of the school's Internet capacity.

An internal study discovered that file-sharing through Gnutella, e-Donkey, and DirectConnect, applications that connect personal computers to each other, accounted for as much as 37% of the school's total bandwidth capacity.

"We can't have that kind of traffic interrupting the legitimate needs of the university, such as patient care and research," said Matt Hall, assistant vice chancellor for IT services.

Hall said the move has less to do with policing students' and other users' Internet activity than with effectively managing campus resources.

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