The College has also had to deal with companies looking to pay students to provide them with copies of the student telephone directory.
Last spring, a Crimson investigation into the source of telemarketing calls led senior tutors in several Houses to warn students that selling the directories for any commercial purpose was an Ad Boardable offense.
However, University Attorney Allan A. Ryan said last spring that Harvard may be largely powerless to prevent private companies from making use of its directory.
A Supreme Court decision in 1990 ruled that a telephone book was little more than a compendium of information arranged alphabetically, and so its contents could not be copyrighted.
"A good deal of the information [in the telephone book] is semi-public," Ryan says.
But Harvard may actually find a silver lining in the direct-marketing madness: the University indirectly owns a small piece of ASL.
ASL merged with Snyder Communications in 1997 and as of August 8th of this year, Harvard owned $1.5 million in Snyder stock--approximately 0.1 percent of the company.