UCA Tops Notification List
For Illegal Music Downloads
Last updated Saturday, May 10, 2008 5:35 PM CDT in News
By The Associated Press
CONWAY - Students have put the University of Central Arkansas at the top of a national ranking, but it's a distinction that school officials could do without.
UCA is currently the No. 1 recipient of Digital Millennium Copyright Act notices in the entire country, according to Liz Kennedy, spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America.
Such letters are sent to the owners of computers or IP addresses used for an illegal music download. In UCA's case, such a letter could be sent to the school after a download by any one of 12,500-plus students or other users of university computers.
"The recipient of a DMCA letter has been caught uploading one or more music files," Kennedy said in an e-mail to the Log Cabin Democrat newspaper. "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 by 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. The cost of installing such a system would most likely be passed to the students, he said.
But Courtway said the university is constantly working to make students aware of the copyright 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."
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VHugo wrote on May 10, 2008 7:01 PM: