I got the following letter from the Vice President & Chief Information Officer at my university (The University of Chicago). Don’t take it to heart, it’s his job.

As you may have read, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and some other copyright owners and groups have recently stepped up their enforcement activities. Among other evidence of this, the University is receiving a much larger volume of complaints about peer-to-peer file sharing under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) . I thought this would be a useful occasion to reiterate relevant University policies and practices.

Under the DMCA, copying and sharing copyrighted materials without a license is illegal. It can subject the user (and in some cases the the University) to penalties. Moreover, the traffic such sharing generates easily can cause problems for other users at the University. Both of these outcomes violate the University’s Eligibility and Acceptable Use Policy (http://nsit.uchicago.edu/eaup). The EAUP provides that the University network may not be used for illegal purposes or in ways that consume resources (such as network capacity) that are intended for teaching, research, and other core purposes.

You should consider removing illegally-obtained copyrighted material and/or peer-to-peer applications that might illegally share copyrighted material from any computer you manage on the University network. If you choose not to remove these, you should IMMEDIATELY ensure that your system is set to prevent it from acting as a provider of unlicensed materials to other users (some instructions are linked to http://security.uchicago.edu, but the only safe action is to remove offending materials and applications entirely).

Federal law requires that the University take action when it is notified that someone on its network is distributing copyrighted materials without a license. Whether you are aware of the violation or not, if NSIT learns that your computer is distributing copyrighted material without a license, we will disable your computer’s network connection until appropriate disciplinary processes are complete and the copyright violation is rectified. In addition, the copyright holder may take legal action against you, and I emphasize that the University will comply with valid subpoenas it receives in such cases.

Gregory A Jackson
Vice President & Chief Information Officer

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