With one bold stroke last week, the Naval Academy became a leader in the battle against college students who illegally swap music and movies over the Internet.

But its decision to seize the computers of nearly 100 midshipmen Thursday was not a calculated reach for national prominence on the issue, experts and people familiar with the academy said yesterday.

Instead, they said, it reflected the higher level of control the military college commands over a wide range of student conduct, from the neatness of dorm rooms to the proper way to salute a senior officer.

"The point that keeps getting missed in all these articles is that this is the Naval Academy," said Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel of the American Council on Education, a Washington group that represents 1,800 colleges and universities, including the U.S. military academies.

"Students have voluntarily signed up for a conduct code that is more stringent than one would see at a public or private university in this country."

When the academy last summer banned students from chanting "Kill!" it didn't make national headlines. But with its move to seize the computers of midshipmen suspected of illegally downloading copyright material, the academy landed with a splash in a debate over how far universities should go to police students' use of the Internet.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is regarded as having one of the toughest policies on Internet piracy. In 1998, a student was expelled. Each year, about 60 first-time offenders are disconnected from the university network and reprimanded in a compulsory meeting with school officials. But the school has never resorted to taking away a computer as part of an investigation, said Jeanne Smythe, the university's director for computer policy.

"In general, we try to respect people's privacy," she said. But like several other education officials interviewed yesterday, she said that the expectations of privacy are different at a military academy.

"We don't do room inspections, either," she said.

Academy officials confiscated the computers from dorm rooms while students were in class Thursday. The seizures were the most aggressive response by an American college or university to concerns that students are going online to download pirated music and movies they haven't paid for.

The action occurred a month after four entertainment industry trade groups mailed letters to 2,300 college and universities asking for a crackdown.

For more than a year, midshipmen have been given lectures and handouts warning against the use of school servers to download digital music files, called MP3s, and other copyright material. When they log on to the school's computer networks, they click on a button acknowledging that their Internet use may be monitored.

The academy identified likely scofflaws in advance by the volume of data flowing in and out of their computers. But they did not give students any warning of Thursday's sting.

Academy officials have said that students found with pirated downloads could face penalties ranging from demerits to expulsion and court martial.

The academy's reticence about its role in the debate over Internet abuse on campuses was reflected in its official silence yesterday.

The new superintendent, Vice Adm. Richard Naughton, declined through a spokesman to be interviewed, even as the academy fielded calls from reporters as far away as California's Silicon Valley.

The seizures struck some education experts and privacy advocates as extreme.

William M. Ferris, a 1970 academy graduate and a lawyer who defends midshipmen accused of misconduct, said that the academy has long had the power to remotely track computer use.

Six or seven years ago, Ferris said, the academy intercepted e-mails while pursuing allegations that a student, Tommie Lee Watkins, had had a gay relationship. Watkins, a battalion commander and president of the class of 1998, resigned a year shy of graduation after the academy threatened to expel him.

"He was writing e-mails to another midshipman, and they intercepted all of them," Ferris said. "My experience is that the Naval Academy can retrieve anything that goes on in a midshipman's computer, which made me wonder why they would" have to seize computers.

Even so, the academy's strict honor code and a thicket of rules governing conduct put it in a different class than most universities.

Tardiness for class, skipping lunch at the mess hall and public drunkenness - all unlikely to raise eyebrows on a civilian campus - are grounds for discipline at the academy.

Unlike, say, the University of Maryland, the academy requires every student to undergo random, unannounced drug tests.

"In general," said retired Adm. Carlisle A.H. Trost, a 1953 alumnus and former chief of naval operations, "the academy has always taken a higher stance and expected a higher moral standard than society in general."