“To whom it may concern: file-sharing is illegal”

A University of Chicago employee shares a recent letter he received from the Vice President & Chief Information Officer at the University of Chicago.

The recent crackdown by the MPAA and the RIAA on university and college students across the country has made some administrators become more proactive in their efforts to discourage illegal P2P and file-sharing usage.

Apparently staff members are not immune from such suspicion, and a blog posting by David Krugg proves that they too are receiving letters warning them of the dangers of copying and sharing copyrighted material without a license.

The fact that our academic institutions have to drop their focus on more important endeavors like RESEARCH, EDUCATION, and COMMUNITY SERVICE is bad enough but, when you contemplate on the reasons why, that it’s in order to weed out swapping Christina Aguilera albums or the new Ghost Rider movie, the threats of the RIAA and the MPAA become completely ludicrous and unbearable.

With some campuses sporting student bodies in excess of 35,000 students, the goal of halting all illegal file-sharing on their networks becomes not only impossible but, impractical. There is just simply no way to monitor them all without creating some sort of Gestapo-like IT division with which to snoop on them all 24/7, and even then, where does one draw the line? Some students actually use P2P networks for legitimate purposes, so will each campus have the Sisyphusian task of monitoring swapped content on a case by case basis? It’s simply ludicrous.

In any event here’s what the warning sent out by the Vice President & Chief Information Officer at the University of Chicago to all of its students and staff members.

As you may have read, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and some other copyright owners and groups have recently stepped up their enforcement activities. Among other evidence of this, the University is receiving a much larger volume of complaints about peer-to-peer file sharing under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) . I thought this would be a useful occasion to reiterate relevant University policies and practices.
Under the DMCA, copying and sharing copyrighted materials without a license is illegal. It can subject the user (and in some cases the the University) to penalties. Moreover, the traffic such sharing generates easily can cause problems for other users at the University. Both of these outcomes violate the University’s Eligibility and Acceptable Use Policy (http://nsit.uchicago.edu/eaup). The EAUP provides that the University network may not be used for illegal purposes or in ways that consume resources (such as network capacity) that are intended for teaching, research, and other core purposes.
You should consider removing illegally-obtained copyrighted material and/or peer-to-peer applications that might illegally share copyrighted material from any computer you manage on the University network. If you choose not to remove these, you should IMMEDIATELY ensure that your system is set to prevent it from acting as a provider of unlicensed materials to other users (some instructions are linked to http://security.uchicago.edu, but the only safe action is to remove offending materials and applications entirely).
Federal law requires that the University take action when it is notified that someone on its network is distributing copyrighted materials without a license. Whether you are aware of the violation or not, if NSIT learns that your computer is distributing copyrighted material without a license, we will disable your computer’s network connection until appropriate disciplinary processes are complete and the copyright violation is rectified. In addition, the copyright holder may take legal action against you, and I emphasize that the University will comply with valid subpoenas it receives in such cases.
Gregory A Jackson
Vice President & Chief Information Officer

So the University of Chicago is adamant about getting into the subpoena business heh? Pretty sad considering it will certainly divert precious student academic fees and the University’s resources away from its core mission and towards the short-sighted financial concerns of America’s media conglomerates. Who says this country couldn’t get any dumber? Apparently we can do anything if we put our mind to it, and disrupting the education of our youth is a good way to get started.

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