If you are under the age of 20, half of you did not purchase a single compact disc last year. You still acquired music — both legally and illegally — but you did it exclusively online. According to today’s teenagers, going to the mall to buy a CD is so last century!

Many of these sites and software that can be downloaded from the Internet allow the illegal “swapping” or “sharing” of music and movies. If you acquired music or movies online illegally, you may be setting yourself up to have your identity stolen. On March 17, Gregory Kopiloff is expected to be sentenced in federal court in Seattle for his guilty plea to charges of mail fraud, accessing a protected computer without authorization to further fraud and aggravated identity theft. Kopiloff used a peer-to-peer file-sharing program called Limewire to secretly obtain sensitive personal and financial information contained in tax returns, credit reports, bank statements and student financial aid applications. These documents were stored on the computers of hundreds of victims, many of whom appear to have been of high school or college age, across the United States. In pleading guilty, Kopiloff admitted to using the personal information of more than 50 individuals to fraudulently obtain more than $73,000 in merchandise.

This is the first time someone has been convicted of using a peer-to-peer file-sharing program to commit identity theft. This case is not the first time, however, Limewire and other peer-to-peer programs have been implicated in the deliberate theft of valuable property. Indeed, these programs are used tens of thousands of times each day for the precise purpose of downloading and distributing to others unauthorized copyrighted music and movie files.

Our subcommittee recently received testimony from representatives of the higher education community, a technology company and the recording industry about the impact of student digital piracy and steps that are available to mitigate this massive misappropriation of intellectual property. Also, a number of us joined in sending a letter and detailed survey to universities that were identified as having received the greatest number of copyright infringement notices.

The survey focused on gathering information about university practices in four areas that are closely associated with reducing student digital piracy. These four areas were: 1) education, 2) enforcement, 3) technology and 4) the availability of legal alternatives.

Consider the case of Ohio University, which a year ago had the dubious distinction of being the U.S. campus in receipt of the greatest number, at 1,287, of copyright infringement notices. As a result of this activity, at least 100 of the university’s students received letters that asked them to contact copyright owners or face a civil lawsuit. Reports indicate that 80 students have since resolved their cases. To their credit, university administrators immediately recognized they had a duty to their students to do more to protect them from the consequences of engaging in this tempting but illegal activity. They responded by making leadership and personnel changes in their office of information technology, filing student judicial charges against first-time offenders, and installing a technology that identifies computers engaged in sharing unauthorized copyrighted media and then disconnects them from the university network.

As a result of these initiatives, the number of reported infringement notices received by the school dropped by nearly 90 percent and no new lawsuits have been filed against Ohio University students. Similar results have been achieved at Howard University, the University of South Carolina and other schools whose leaders have decided to take positive steps and harness technology as part of the solution to curb illegal student downloading. By discouraging illegal file sharing activity, these schools are not merely protecting the financial interests of copyright owners nor limiting the potential legal liability of students who might be tempted to otherwise download media files illegally. One of the lessons to be learned from the Kopiloff case is they are also protecting student network users from identity thieves.

Coble is the ranking member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, and is the subcommittee’s former chairman.