August 2007

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and copyright owners of music, movies and other materials are aggressively pursuing people who illegally share files, using lawsuits and subpoenas. This indeed can happen here.  In the spring of 2007, five Bates computer users were threatened with lawsuits for copyright infringement by attorneys representing record companies and the recording industry. They were among thousands of affected college and university computer users nationwide.

In the strongest possible terms the College reminds you of your responsibility to avoid sharing music, video or software files over the Internet unless you have received explicit permission from the copyright owner or have paid a fee to obtain the materials legally. In most cases, the copyright owner is the publisher, producer, or performer of a song, program, album, or film. To reduce the impact on the College, ILS attempts to severely limit the Internet bandwidth associated with common file sharing services such as aimster, audiogalaxy, blubster, edonkey, gnutella, hotline, imesh, kazaa, limewire, napster, scout exchange, ares and others. If you have downloaded any of these applications or similar file sharing applications, you should remove them from your computer. See our Web page for links to Internet resources to help you do this:

http://www.bates.edu/p2p-configuration.xml

Bates limits on peer-to-peer bandwidth will not affect your ability to purchase and download media from Web sites such as buymusic.com or apple.com/music.

• If you are downloading or sharing copyrighted materials without permission, you are breaking Federal law, violating College policy and exposing yourself to considerable risk.
• You are not anonymous on the Internet, and you may not be aware that your computer is sharing files. Computers can be identified by Internet address. Copyright owners can detect downloading and file sharing.
• The potential risks are very large. College students, including Bates students, have settled copyright lawsuits for thousands of dollars each. The RIAA has issued hundreds of subpoenas seeking financial damages for illegally downloaded or shared music files, many of them directed at computer users at colleges. Penalties could be up to $150,000 per file.  In some cases there could be criminal charges as well.
• Placing legal copies of digital materials in publicly shared directories on the campus network could also result in legal action against you by copyright owners unless you own distribution rights for those materials.
• Some file sharing is perfectly legitimate. Some artists make their recordings available over the Internet without restriction. New services exist to pay monthly or per-song fees to download music. If you are sharing materials for educational purposes in a class, staff in Ladd Library, Academic Technology Services or Help Desk Services can help you set up a password-protected location or library reserve so that you can share materials under ‘fair use’ or comply with restrictions imposed by the copyright owner.
• You are responsible for your compliance with copyright law. The College cannot take responsibility for your compliance, and cannot defend you against a claim by a copyright owner. If College officials receive a complaint about your behavior, we are required to take action, which could include such steps as terminating your network connection or providing your name to the copyright owner.

You should take the appropriate steps to protect yourself from what may be very unfortunate consequences. We have posted answers to some of the most frequent questions we have received at: www.bates.edu/ils/policies/sharingFILES-FAQ.html

Questions about copyright compliance or file sharing should be directed to: