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A Rutgers College student at Brower Commons on the College Avenue campus held his laptop high in the air 11:50 p.m., playing the music so easily shared on campus for so many years. In the middle of a large crowd, his Winamp player led a chorus of the Beatle's song "Yesterday."
With six minutes left to go before the direct connect server was to be shut down, people yelled out, "Why?" in dramatic fashion. The flood of conversations that took over Brower Commons was a minor protest, a celebration and a memorial service.
The server popularly known as Optimus Prime - which students connected to via the program Direct Connect - was shut down by University administrators Monday at 11:59 p.m. Over a hundred Rutgers College students gathered at Brower Commons to count down the minutes while its founder and operators gave their thanks and said, "All right guys, we're out. We love you all."
"I'm feeling sad it has to go," said Bryan McKenna, a third-year Cook College student. "It was a staple of Rutgers to me, and now it's gone."
Direct Connect is a data-sharing program that connected students from the New Brunswick, Newark and Camden campuses through a server called Optimus Prime, housed for years in student dorms. Anyone who registered his or her computers with University Residential Networking on the campus network could connect to it. Along with file sharing, the program also has a chat element, which many students said brought them closer to other members of the University community.
For Avo Youmshakian, a third-year School of Engineering student, Direct Connect was the "one chance Rutgers students had to come together. Not only is it file sharing, it's a community."
Dean Joan Carbone and two members of the Information Protection and Security Department told students and server operators Friday the server must be shut down in response to an anonymous detailed report of file-sharing activity.
According to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1999, if a formal complaint regarding activities deemed illegal by the DMCA is made, and a university does not actively investigate it, that university will lose protections granted to it by law.
Lance Jordan, director of IPS, and Carbone decided against expelling the students but warned them of the consequences if anything like this occurred again.
Rather than prosecuting the students involved, the University decided to issue a warning in order to educate the community about the illegality of file sharing and its consequences.
"It was so widespread we wanted to get word out to educate everybody - it's widespread, and it needs to stop," Jordan said.
Jordan pointed out students could share as little as one copyrighted file and still open themselves up to lawsuits.
The end of Direct Connect came as a mixed blessing to the operators who said it could have ended worse. The Recording Industry Association of America has sued students across the country for copyright violations.
"It's better now than having everyone to pay $1,000 or something," said the founder of the network, a student who asked to be identified only as Jason for fear of losing his job.
Direct Connect began three years ago by University students and has continuously been operated by students. It housed file sharing and a heavily used chat element.
"It was made out of boredom. We had nothing to do," Jason said.
Since coming online in September 2001, Optimus Prime became the nexus of the largest file-sharing network in the University.
"During the spring 2003 semester, there were over 12,400 unique users online to Direct Connect," Holt said. "Since then, we've lost count."
The last words ever spoken through Optimus Prime offer a snapshot of its three-year connection to student's lives. One student asked where to find illegal software. Another said, "They might be monitoring this chat," and the last of millions of lines of conversation spoken throughout the years was "Everything is lagging."
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