Each new semester is accompanied by unusually high increases in copyright infringement violations from within UAA’s campus network. Copyright violations are mostly associated with illegal Music, Video and Software downloads or file sharing. Agencies such as the Motion Picture Association and the Business Software Alliance continually monitor network activity and notify UA’s legal council when they discover theft of their property from within the University of Alaska’s network. Fines associated with theft of copyrighted material can go as high as $150,000.00 per incident.
Personal computers on UAA’s network are identified by several different means. These include user names, IP addresses, and the unique MAC address associated with each network interface card (NIC). Users or owners of personal computers are responsible for activity on UAA’s data network from their personal computers.
Best practices to protect yourself include setting up a unique username and password for your computer and by removing any peer to peer file sharing programs.
Who Monitors Peer-to-Peer File Sharing?
Most complaints come from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and their member companies. They monitor peer-to-peer file sharing networks like BitTorrent, Kazaa, and Limewire to identify the network addresses of computers that send or receive copyrighted files. They are filing lawsuits against the users of those computers.
What is the Responsibility of UAA?
Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), university administrators are obligated to provide copyright holders with information about users of the university network who have violated the law. In other words: if you are caught, the university, by law, must report you. Also keep in mind that working together to address this problem is actually mutually beneficial: illegal file sharing drains bandwidth, costing schools money and slowing computer connections for students trying to use the network for legitimate academic purposes.
UAA Policies Governing P2P
The University of Alaska Anchorage abides strictly by Federal laws overseeing illegal fire sharing. Federal law (Title 17, United States Code, Sections 501 & 506) provides severe civil and criminal penalties for unauthorized reproduction, distribution, rental or digital transmission of copyrighted sound recordings.
Essentially, the law says that you cannot have any files on your computer that you have not legally acquired. More importantly, you cannot share a file with others without authorization from the file’s copyright owner. While it may appear that digital information is freely available on the Internet, the truth is that it’s not free unless the copyright owner says so.