E-mail Notice
The notice below was originally shared with the university community via e-mail.
February 1, 2005
Music Sharing
The following information was recently e-mailed to all HSU students. I wanted to share this with you, as well.
Rollin C. Richmond
President
Dear HSU Student:
I hope that you, like me, are an avid user of the Internet for a variety of purposes including education and fun. What especially pleases me is when I find that fun and education are so intertwined on the Internet that I don't know which is which. Like any powerful human technology, the Internet is being used for many good and unethical purposes. A very good use which has been compared to the invention of the printing press is the recent announcement by Google that they will support the digitization of books and materials from some of the world's best libraries and make those materials available for free on the Internet as long as they are not covered by copyright. Copyright is a law of the United States which provides legal protection for the authors of books, music, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, motion pictures and other audiovisual works. This allows creative people to make a living from their talents that the rest of us often enjoy and are sometimes willing to pay to experience. An unethical use of the Internet is its use to distribute the artistic creations of others without their permission and without compensating them in some way. The invention of file sharing applications as a means of readily sharing music over the Internet and the response of the music industry are examples of unethical use of the Internet. I know that people, myself included, sometimes feel that some businesses make significant profits from the creativity of artists, share little with the creators, and, of course, charge the consumer a lot. I hear this as a frequent justification for copying music and other artistic creations from the Internet. However, in my view, two wrongs almost never make a right. Stealing whether done by a big business or a small consumer is ethically wrong and illegal.
All this is a prelude to the official notice below which says that you can get yourself in legal trouble if you use copyrighted material from the web without paying for it. I urge you to follow the suggestions below and not break the law by copying or sharing copyrighted materials without compensating the owners or having their permission. If you disagree with copyright and how it is applied, then by all means work to get that law changed. That won't be easy, but you will learn a lot in the process and perhaps be giving much to your society. Thanks for reading this far, please keep reading and have a great semester.
Students should be aware that the unauthorized sharing of peer-to-peer file copyrighted works, including music, pictures, and movies, is a violation of campus computer use policy.
The Recording Industry Association of America has also begun an effort to subpoena information about individuals who are believed to have engaged in unauthorized peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing of copyrighted music and other works. Several universities have been served with subpoenas. The penalty for copyright infringement, both monetary damages and in some cases criminal liability is significant. Damages can range from $200 per infringement for an "innocent" violation to $150,000 per infringement for a willful violation. For further information on the RIAA and its work to reduce infringement, see: www.riaa.com.
It is your responsibility to ensure that whatever files you share via computer exchange are not copyrighted works or that you have the permission of the copyright holder to share the files. Online services are now available that allow us to buy music for reasonable prices that return some of the profits to the copyright holder.
http://www.apple.com/music/store/,
http://www.mp3grandcentral.net/signup.html,
http://launch.yahoo.com/.
Rollin C. Richmond
President