content: Illegally sharing copyrighted materials =/= Free speech. Universities are doing this for two primary reasons:   The university does not want to deal with the legal mess of DMCA notices and any legal threats that they may receive from its users sharing copyrighted content.   Universities (at least the ones I'm familiar with) aren't in the business of giving you artificial speed caps like residential ISPs in the hopes that you buy higher packages. They usually give you as much speed as the infrastructure is capable of providing. This gets ruined when cunts decide to be seeding their torrents of Cuties at 1 Gbps.   Lastly, I occasionally use academic VPNs myself to access academic papers that would otherwise be behind a journal's paywall. I don't abuse access to these networks. Edit: Also universities don't give a fuck if you're torrenting through a VPN (so long as you aren't constantly using huge amounts of bandwidth). The reason they don't care is because the legal burden of copyright enforcements is no longer on them but rather a VPN who is paid good $$$ to deal with that shit. Edit #2: Here's somebody who understands exactly what I'm talking about.