Private Universities are spending close to $500,000 in anti-piracy efforts to prevent students from utilizing file-sharing networks.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Colleges are spending a good deal of money to prevent students from downloading copyrighted music and movies, says a report released today. And with new requirements recently imposed on institutions of higher education by Congress, the report’s author argues, the cost of fighting piracy could rise even further.

The report, “The Campus Costs of P2P Compliance,” describes a study conducted by the Campus Computing Project, which surveys colleges about their use of information technology.

The breakdown of spending by the colleges:

Deterrents to piracy, on the other hand, can be costly. Private universities spent an average of $408,000 during the 2007 academic year on antipiracy efforts—about $105,000 on bandwidth-management and traffic-monitoring software, $159,000 on hardware, and $144,000 in additional costs, the study found. Public universities spent nearly $170,000 apiece, including $22,000 on software, $65,000 on hardware, and $83,000 in other expenditures.

Community colleges, which typically do not give students access to residential computer networks, ran up significantly lower costs fighting piracy: They spent an average of about $7,000 on software and $43,000 on hardware, says the report.

In addition to the hardware and software costs, Mr. Green says, institutions use considerable staff time “doing pro bono enforcement for the entertainment industry.”