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Your Rights and Responsibilities* Background Technological developments during the past several years have enhanced your ability to download and share copyrighted materials such as music and movies. With these innovations come responsibilities and liabilities with respect to appropriate use of copyrighted material. This brochure provides an overview of Colorado College policies and procedures governing music and movie sharing and how we deal with alleged violations. Recent legal actions by the Recording Industry Association of America, Inc. (RIAA) against violators of music copyright have made it imperative that you understand the risks and the impact of your behavior when downloading and sharing music and movies with others. Copyright Law The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material regardless of the format of that material. The basic premise of the law is to protect the creative product of artists and authors and allow them to control the distribution of their work and to receive compensation when their work is used or sold. Although copyright law is complicated and its interpretation a legal matter, it is clear that copyright rules apply to materials available in digital format over the Internet such as music and movies. CC copyright policy, as articulated in the Faculty Handbook, can be seen HERE. Also, Tutt Library staff can provide guidance on copyright with respect to library reserve materials. Academic Use of Digital Materials There may be times when you would like to use copyrighted digital materials as part of your academic coursework. In most cases, this constitutes what is called "Fair Use" of copyrighted material for educational purposes. However, there are some general guidelines to keep in mind. The UCLA Faculty New Media Center has a webpage entitled "Copyright Issues for Academics" which is a great resource for Fair Use guidelines. Portion or use limits they suggest include: Motion media - up to 10% or 3 minutes, whichever is less, text - up to 10% or 1000 words, whichever is less, music - up to 10% or 30 seconds, whichever is less and photos and images - up to 5 works from one author; up to 10% or 15 works, whichever is less, from a collection. Please refer to the UCLA site for more Fair Use information. Most importantly, if you are going to use digital materials in your coursework or assignments, proper citation of such source material is mandatory, as per the Colorado College Honor Code. Tutt Library has an excellent resource page on how to cite on-line sources of information. You can refer to it HERE. Peer-to-Peer Programs (P2P) Spurred on by the widespread use of the Internet, P2P programs have been developed to allow people to share information in digital formats. In particular, programs like KaZaA, Gnutella, Morpheus, AudioGalaxy, and others are commonly used to share music and movies without regard to the restrictions placed on that material by the copyright owners. Most commercially produced music and movies are copyrighted and cannot be freely downloaded or shared despite the ease of doing so. This is the law. At Colorado College, we expect all system users to adhere to relevant copyright laws. Because our bandwidth is a costly and limited resource, we give priority to academic uses of our network. The downloading of music and movie files, which tend to be large, slows down our network for everyone. Thus while we do not access or examine the information content that is being transmitted (e.g., a particular song or video), ITS does monitor the type of information (e.g., MP3 file) so we can throttle such uses. This “traffic shaping” is a practice that is used at most higher education institutions today. We strongly encourage all members of the college community to be responsible users of our network resources – see our Acceptable Use policy. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) The DMCA specifies procedures that Colorado College and other higher education institutions must follow when notified that an individual using our network is violating copyright laws. If the copyright holder contacts ITS about a violation we will notify the user that a notice has been received, require removal of the offending material from the user’s computer and may stop network access for the user. Such users have the right to claim that the material is not protected by copyright and defend their actions at their own expense against the copyright holder. To date, every notice we have received has resulted in the offending material being removed. The details about the DMCA procedures can be found HERE Recent Legal Actions Recently, the RIAA has taken further action to subpoena the names of people who are sharing large amounts of music. If Colorado College receives a subpoena, we are legally required to provide the names of the violators using our network. These subpoenas can lead to lawsuits, substantial financial penalties and perhaps jail time. In the spring of 2003, for example, four students at other colleges settled copyright claims against them out-of-court for approximately $15,000 each. The consequences of illegally sharing copyrighted material over the Internet are serious. Some people have argued that the recording industry has been overcharging for music CDs and that music sharing is justified. Others feel that the recording industry has been too slow to adopt legal ways for music to be distributed over the Internet at lower cost. Regardless of these or other justifications, most music and movie downloading and sharing violates the law that we are bound to uphold. If you download and/or distribute copyrighted music and videos you are putting yourself at risk of losing computing privileges and facing prosecution under civil and criminal laws. Protecting Yourself Because of functionality built into file-sharing software resident on your computer, your audio and video files may be available for uploading over the Internet without your knowledge or permission. For more information on how to turn off this functionality, and for other tips on responsible computing, please contact the Help Desk (x-6449 or e-mail HelpDesk@coloradocollege.edu) *This wording on this web page was developed at Hamilton College and has been adapted for our use at Colorado Colleg |