6 may face file sharing charges
By Will Wingfield
Managing Editor

Over the next few weeks, as many as six students are scheduled to face university charges of violation of university copyright and computing guidelines for illegally sharing a song owned by Sony Music Entertainment.

Information Systems said that NetPD, which is investigating Internet piracy for Sony, cited seven instances of copyright violation over file-sharing programs. Each case is for pirating the same song, Michael Jackson’s unreleased single “You Rock My World.”
Information Systems was not able to confirm which file-sharing programs were used.
“My understanding, and I haven’t talked to the people at NetPD, is that they are looking at users, people, who are providing these files for download,” said Jay Dominick, an assistant vice president and the chief information officer.

According to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which governs copyright law for the Internet, the university, “upon receiving proper notification of claimed infringement … must expeditiously take down or block access to the material.”

Upon receiving an e-mail notification from NetPD, Dominick said, “we look up in our logs to find out who that machine belonged to and call them and ask them to come in … and when they do, we ask them to turn on their computer and we actually look for those files.”

If IS finds the offending file, it is deleted and the IS’s report is forwarded to Harold Holmes, an associate vice president and the dean of student services.

In an effort that may prevent students’ susceptibility to lawsuits, Dominick then responds to NetPD.

“I don’t tell them who it was, or what happened,” he said. “I tell them we complied.”
Lee Norris, the director of academic operations and systems support at IS, oversees the process of cleaning offending files off students’ computers.

“We don’t go through the computer finding files, we take action on reported instances,” he said. “We’re not in the business of policing. If someone reports that there has been this type of violation, we investigate this type of report.”

However, senior Kevin Solis, who was called in last year for sharing files on a personal FTP site, bemoaned the personal files he lost when IS went through his hard drive.

“They made me transfer everything over to a new computer and overwrote my old hard drive,” he said. “One thing they wouldn’t let me keep was MP3s. My friend gave me rights to distribute whatever I wanted to distribute from his band and they scratched all of that, too.”

Once the charges are forwarded to the school’s judiciary arm, hearings are held and a punishment is determined.

Ricardo Hall, an assistant dean and judicial officer, is scheduled to be the hearing officer for the Michael Jackson cases.

“Standard sanctions that might apply are community service and fines,” he said. “I know a Rule 20 (computing) case we had last year, for example, we had a student reword one of our policies more accurately to state what we mean by our copyright policy.”

That policy was adopted in the 2001-2002 Student Handbook.

Suspension of certain network functions, such as e-mail and logons, are also presumptive sanctions for a computing violation.

As to why the offending files are all the same Michael Jackson song, Hall said “I think it’s because of the span of control Michael Jackson has over his music. I think he puts a closer scrutiny over the Internet for who can copy his music.”

Dominick added that he doesn’t like to prosecute students.

“I can’t tell you how much we hate doing this stuff. It’s traumatic for the student involved, and it’s a trauma for the person on my staff that has to do this,” he said. “I groan when I get these things.”