Students on the University of Central Arkansas campus enjoy their music, but according to Liz Kennedy, spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America, some are obtaining it illegally.
Kennedy said in an e-mail Tuesday UCA is currently the No. 1 recipient of Digital Millennium Copyright Act notices in the entire country.
"The recipient of a DMCA letter has been caught uploading one or more music files," Kennedy said. "We never know the identity of these individuals. We rely upon the university to follow up with the individual in question and ensure that the infringing material is taken down."
Tom Courtway, general counsel for UCA, said Thursday the software and programs necessary to be able to track what is downloaded on each computer on campus would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and is not something the university can currently afford.
"I have talked with lawyers from the RIAA before and we have told them we don't have the capability to identify a particular computer in a particular dorm room," Courtway said. "We are simply a conduit, so what happens is UCA provides the Internet service to a dorm room but what goes on on that computer or is downloaded onto that computer, we don't know and we don't have a way to check."
Courtway said he would guess most universities do not have that capability and to implement that system onto the UCA campus, the cost would most likely have to be passed to the students. He added there is currently no requirement for universities to have such software and if efforts are made to change that, UCA will comply.
UCA officials and faculty deal with copyright laws in textbooks and in classrooms daily, but Courtway said when it comes to downloading music, the university simply has no way to monitor who is doing what.
However, he said the university is constantly working on making the students aware of the law and actively asking them not to violate it.
"We tell our students in the handbook we give them that they are violating copyright laws by downloading music," Courtway said. "Every college in the nation has students who are doing it, but we do our best to stop it and we do all we can to make them understand what the law is."
Another type of notification UCA has received from the recording industry is pre-lawsuit notification letters. According to Kennedy, UCA received 27 of those letters in July 2007.
"On behalf of our member companies, the RIAA sends the pre-litigation letters to universities with the request that administrators will forward the letters to the appropriate network user whom has been identified as engaging in illegal copyright infringement," Kennedy said in an e-mail. "This process allows individuals to resolve forthcoming copyright infringement claims against them at a discounted rate before a formal suit is filed."
According to Courtway, the notification letters the university has received from the RIAA concerning the alleged infringements on campus state the date and time of the event and the Internet Protocol address of the computer. However, Courtway said UCA is on a system in which a different IP address may be used each time a computer is logged onto the system.
(Staff writer Jessica Bauer can be reached by e-mail at jessica.bauer@thecabin.net or by phone at 505-1236. To comment on this and other stories in the Log Cabin, log on to www.thecabin.net. Send us your news at www.thecabin.net/submit)
