I had a strangely similar problem to this in college with the network admins and filesystem permissions. This was back in the day when everybody was using the

I had a strangely similar problem to this in college with the network admins and filesystem permissions. This was back in the day when everybody was using the unix network (pine for email, etc). Many people had webpages on their university accounts and would also store homework online. A very popular thing to do was to go into someone else's home directory and copy their .fvwmrc or .bashrc file (yes this was a few years ago). The IT people came up with a new policy that said you were not allowed to look into other people's directories without explicit (possibly written) permission from the owner. They said that copying files could be considered "cheating" and possibly copyright infringement and you'd be referred to the university disciplinary court. I assume this all stemmed from fear of cheating. In any event, I got into a long debate with the IT people about the whole point of unix file permissions. Basically: if you don't want people to look at your stuff, don't let them. As you might guess, when dealing with university IT, I was on the losing end of the argument.