In a scene repeated at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities over the last week, students and employees have found themselves face-to-face with federal law enforcement agents offering them a choice: Talk to us about thrill-seeking software piracy gangs or face a prison cell. The Customs Service, which is conducting the questionings, said many of the students and university employees were cooperating with the inquiry, which is being described as the largest criminal investigation of software piracy ever by the federal government. Investigators say the inquiry has expanded exponentially since it was announced late last week with r at several universities, including Duke, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Los Angeles, and on the offices of several software and computer companies around the country. In the days since, many of the people under investigation, which includes executives at software companies, have quietly begun cooperating. Their information led to r on at least one other university, the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Law-enforcement officials said more r were imminent as they tried to shut down a multi-billion- dollar international piracy ring that had stolen everything from the latest version of popular office software to digitized versions of new hit films and had shared the software around the world through Internet sites, such as the latest version of the Windows operating system, Windows XP, and such recent Hollywood fare as "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone," and "Behind Enemy Lines." Investigators say some of the software appears to have been stolen by executives and other insiders at the companies where it was made, which explains the r on corporate offices. Customs officials said they believed that their efforts had shut down the piracy gang, known as the "DrinkOrDie" network, and that other, similar piracy gangs were being investigated. The Customs Service estimates that DrinkOrDie has more than 200 members around the world. "We were able to totally dismantle DrinkOrDie," said Kevin Delli-Colli, the director of the Customs Service Cyber Smuggling Center in Faix, outside Washington. "Most of the leadership has been exposed by the investigation." A Web site that had been used by the network to share software, www. drinkordie, com, was shut down last week. Law enforcement officials say that the results of the investigation so far, which is being called Operation Buccaneer, continue to support the theory that the ringleaders of the network were motivated by thrill-seeking, rather than by profit, but that their crimes have allowed others to profit from the sale of pirated software. No arrests have been made so far, because the Customs Service is trying to persuade more suspects to cooperate in exchange for leniency. Operation Buccaneer, the ever-largest inquiry of its kind in the nation, has ______