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UCLA fights illegal file-sharing

22 September 2003 14:52 by Jari Ketola

Even though universities have had strict anti-piracy policies for ages, the recent RIAA lawsuits have forced universities to remind their students about the illegal nature of file-sharing.

One of these universities is UCLA, where piracy is handled at zero tolerance. However the university doesn't monitor the network traffic in any way, so the initiative for removing copyrighted material from the university network has to come from the likes of RIAA and MPAA.

When UCLA is notified, it provides a first notification to the offender, asking that person to stop. However, if that person is performing "massive" amounts of copying, subpoenas may be issued and that person may be subject to external law enforcement.

UCLA has informed their students about copyright issues via email, as well as univeristy newsletter and TV-channel last year. The same process will be repeated in the beginning of October. Many students had been looking forward to using the fast university Internet connections to download content, but have to re-think whether or not to risk it.

"It kind of sucks because I don't have a fast (Internet) connection at home and I was planning on downloading here," said first-year biology student Jennifer Tran. "But then all the lawsuit stuff happened over summer."

Why not take a look at our free MP3 site, MP3Lizard?

New, more secure P2P clients are bound to appear on the market, making the task of discovering the identities of the offenders more difficult for the RIAA. Hopefully, by then, there will be an arrangement made available by the record companies enabling P2P users to legally share and download music, at a fixed cost. There won't be one, of course, but one can always hope.

Source:
Daily Bruin

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