Typically, it can take days or weeks for a university to act on a copyright violation request. When a request reaches the IT administrators, they must investigate who used the IP address in violation of its file-sharing copyright policies. Then they send a note to the residential housing adviser where the student lives. The adviser then sends a note to the dean's office about the student's activity. And the dean will act on the school's policy for such behavior, notifying the student and potentially disconnecting Internet access to the student's machine.

ACNS would trigger such e-mail notifications and could automatically choke off the student's access to a peer-to-peer network, while leaving his Internet or e-mail connection untouched. Depending on the school's policy, it could put the student into a 30-minute penalty box, without access, on the first offense. The second offense could warrant a week without peer-to-peer privileges, and so forth.

A report is generated on the infringing act, including who was notified and how the situation was handled, and a log is created at the monitoring station.