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OFFICE OF STUDENT CONDUCT AND COMMUNITY STANDARDS
Illegal Downloading
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Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards Student Conduct Process Flow Chart University Policies/ How to File a Formal Complaint Hearing Tips for the Advisor of the Accused |
Illegal Downloading: Violators
Risk Jail Time and Massive Fines
The following information has been compiled to let the student body know more about copyright, the law, and the risks that you take on when you knowingly or unknowingly violate the law. This information could be extremely important to you, particularly if you have a high-speed Internet connection or an even faster university-provided connection to the Internet and Internet2. Violations of the type claimed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) could result in jail time and massive fines. Please read this information and discuss it with your friends. COPYRIGHT: WHAT IS IT? The idea for copyright starts in Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"). The founders wrote that it is in the public interest to give inventors
(of machines and processes) and authors (of creative works) a limited-time
"exclusive" on their use and the profit from their efforts and
creativity before releasing that right to the public for the common good.
The laws regulating copyright are established and updated by the U.S.
Congress, most
The RIAA represents the record labels. Those firms' businesses are built around hiring creators and performers to produce new songs, which the record labels copyright and sell, and pay the artists out of the proceeds. They know they have only a limited time in which to make a profit before the public loses interest in a song. The firms have long worried about copyright violations from cassette recorders and VCRs. Those technologies make it easy to make a few copies of a copyrighted work, albeit at reduced quality. Computers and high-speed networks change everything, making it easy to distribute thousands of perfect copies of a copyrighted work. This has raised the stakes enormously.
In a word, no. Respect for intellectual property rights is intrinsic to research institutions like Drexel. Such respect is codified in numerous policies, including the Acceptable Use Policy to which every holder of a Drexel computer account agrees as a condition of receiving that account. Some students have thought that the i2hub program is an Internet2-sponsored
project or that Drexel installed some device to make downloading files
fast, easy, and free -- these students are wrong. Further, the name of
the program used to transmit and receive protected files without permission
doesn't matter; it's the act ("stealing") that matters, not
the method
In 1984 the Motion Picture Association of America ("MPAA"), the movie industry's version of the RIAA, tried to block the sale of Sony's Betamax VCR. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that VCRs were legal because they had "substantial non-infringing uses" and that recording a television show to watch it in a different time or different place (called "time and space shifting") is OK per the "fair use" doctrine in copyright law. The Court ruled that the VCR did have legitimate uses, but it did not say that all VCR uses were legal. By analogy, in the RIAA suit, a device or file-sharing program might be legal for some uses, but other uses such as unauthorized distribution of a song are clearly illegal. Remember that "fair use" does not refer to the principles or opinions of an individual like yourself, but to the specific usages that have been defined in legislation and by the courts.
Yes. Most of the programs that you can use to download songs are part of a category called "peer-to-peer" (P2P) sharing programs. These enable individuals to form larger groups to speed up the transfer of files. In a practical sense, that means that these programs turn your computer into a server that can send files to others upon request. There are legitimate uses for such programs, but making copies of things that you aren't entitled to isn't one of them and it isn't covered by fair use. Many P2P programs scan your computer to find media files (even those that you acquired legitimately) and reconfigure your computer to upload these files to others upon request, even after you restart your computer. So, even though you thought that you were just downloading one song, you find yourself in the position of frequently uploading that song and other files to others. If the RIAA searches a P2P network for a copyrighted file and sees it as available from your computer, you're in trouble.
No, that is illegal too. The Motion Picture Association of America ("MPAA") feels the same way about their movies that the RIAA feels about their songs; software publishers concur. They do not want you distributing their copyrighted works without their permission. In fact, the MPAA is closely following what the RIAA is doing, has already notified Drexel of over 100 instances of alleged illegally shared works. The MPAA may pursue the RIAA's course of action by suing students for copyright infringement.
Well, the first thing to do is to stop receiving and distributing copyright- protected works without permission. The easiest way to do that is to uninstall the programs that you installed to do this. Anything short of this requires constant vigilance on your part to make sure that your computer is doing only what you want it to do. Consider subscribing to a legitimate online music service such as Napster or Rhapsody. (Note, we aren't endorsing any particular service.) Before subscribing to a service, check to make sure that it is compatible with your computer and portable media player.
Any claims that copyright law is unconstitutional, doesn't apply to you, or is trumped by some religious or other circumstance is just plain wrong. Any claim that fair use allows you to make copies of songs for or from friends is wrong. The penalties for violating DMCA can be as high as $100,000 per file. This is serious business and you need to know that those who stand to lose the most money want to make examples of those who steal from them. Drexel will be developing a more extensive body of information and links about copyright issues for students during the summer. Until then, here are links to information that we think will be helpful to you: http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/howto-notgetsued.php |
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Last Modified Wednesday March 26, 2008 |
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