When I was doing my MSc six years ago I was told by my supervisor not to download too many more papers relating to my project because the school could get IP-ba

When I was doing my MSc six years ago I was told by my supervisor not to download too many more papers relating to my project because the school could get IP-banned. I'd read pretty much every published paper relating to a small subfield of Physics at this point, but still no more than 50 papers in all. I think I just laughed it off and said I'd got no plans to scrape journals. I always thought it was a bit of institutional folklore and that maybe there had been threatening letters or something. I didn't realise they actually do go ahead with the IP-banning.