Students are warned of DMCA violations; truth of illegal downloads
Ever worry that Pepperdine is checking the websites students visit or download? According to Chief Information Security Officer Kim Cary, it’s a common misconception that students get in trouble for downloading.
“In a point of fact, they are not caught downloading,” Cary said. “They are caught uploading. Nobody knows what you are downloading. What we are looking for in this office is what is harming the university. We are not at all interested what websites people are going on.”
The Information Security Office is responsible for helping students and colleagues maintain trust in the university, primarily by safeguarding the university and specifically student data, according to Cary.
Chief Information Officer Jonathan See sent a mass email to students and faculty Sept. 4 about the legal risks of sharing copyrighted files, including a potential $250,000 federal fine and up to five years in prison.
“Part of what we are doing is fulfilling a legal obligation that’s required of the university,” Cary said. “In 2008, the Higher Education Opportunity Act conditioned some funding which helps with tuition and stuff like that. Among the things that universities are required to do effective in 2010 is provide an annual notice to all faculty staff and students about their legal rights and responsibilities with sharing or downloading copyrighted materials.”
Additionally, the university is required to have a vigorous program responding to Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaints, which notify the university when pirated material is discovered on the IP address base.
“What we do is we verify that the IP address was indeed doing that kind of thing at that time, and we block that computer off the network,” Cary said. “The person on their next web browse will get a webpage redirect that puts them on a page that says, ‘You’ve been blocked for copyright violation.’”
Students who have been blocked from the server would then see Tech Central, who gets the file-sharing software off of the machine.
Lastly, the student is given a copy of the DMCA notice, provided by the copyright holder, which then goes to Student Affairs.
According to Cary, the number of piracy notices that the Information Security Office receives per month has decreased.
“It’s not as much as it used to be,” Cary said. “And if you think about it, loading a file sharing program on your computer rips you off because the music that you have paid for, the CDs you’ve ripped to disc, the things that you’ve downloaded from Amazon or iTunes and legal places like that, that file sharing software immediately turns around shares back out to the Internet. And it isn’t uncommon that when somebody wants to infect a bunch of computers, they will put a Trojan Horse version of the software or the item out there.”
In spite of the potential fines, viruses and imprisonment, most college students seem to believe that music piracy is “not that big of a deal,” according to freshman Chelsea Erselius.
“When you think of illegal actions, uploading and downloading music off the Internet is not the first thing that pops into your head,” Erselius said. “I mean, how many times in the news do you hear about someone being arrested for downloading music? I feel like it’s not enforced.”
Cary argues that there are alternatives to illegally uploading and downloading music.
“There are all kinds of arguments, but whether you feel it is morally right or morally wrong, [sharing copyrighted files] is in fact in this country illegal,” Cary said. “It doesn’t cost that much to be honest and have integrity and to give the artists their due.”
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Follow Julia Naman on Twitter: @Julia_Naman
As published in the Oct. 3, 2013 issue of the Pepperdine Graphic.
