The University has recently taken several measures to address increasing pressure from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to clamp down on copyright infringement.

On Thursday, students were required to agree to a statement in their electronic portfolios pledging to abstain from illegal sharing, in particular audio and video file sharing.

Last spring, the university was one of 40 colleges and universities that received letters from the RIAA and MPAA demanding that it curb illegal copyright infringement. University lawyers recommended the school take proactive steps to protect itself and avoid litigation.

The agreement that appeared in students’ electronic portfolios acknowledged the crucial need for intellectual property (IP) education.

“By clicking on the accept button below, I acknowledge that as a member of the Wesleyan community, I am committed to understanding and respecting intellectual property rights,” the statement read.

“The question was how do we proactively tell our constituents about the law,” said Associate Vice President for Information Technology Services and Adjunct Associate Professor of Chemistry Ganesan Ravishanker, who worked on the agreement. “We wanted to target a particular issue, be concise, and have people read it.”

Ravishanker stressed that the University has not submitted to several of the RIAA and MPAA requests. Because it is difficult to view in-network activity from the outside, the RIAA and MPAA have pressured schools to adopt blocking and filtering devices of their own.

While the University does not condone illegal sharing, it refuses to monitor individual computer activity on its Local Area Network (LAN), instead choosing to restrict the percentage of bandwidth available for file sharing.

If students share files from within the University network to computers outside, however, they expose themselves to litigation. Students living in wood-frame housing are particularly at risk because they fall outside the LAN.

Out of network activity can be monitored by the RIAA and MPAA, and University students have been targeted in the past. Over the last several years, the RIAA and MPAA have filed multiple complaints against University students.

“If an organization finds out about repeat violators and they issue a subpoena, we are bound by law to cooperate,” Ravishanker said. The RIAA and MPAA can file complaints against particular IP addresses for sharing specific copyrighted materials.

The Universty then puts these students’ computers in “quarantine,” where they can still access e-mail and blackboard but they cannot share files until the offending files have been removed.

During the 2004-2005 academic year, 40 student computers were put in quarantine, and during 2005-2006 that number dropped to 15. Since the start of this year, 10 computers have already been quarantined. After students comply with the rules and regulations of quarantine, their computers are allowed back onto the network.

In an effort to raise awareness about IP issues, the University has launched a website, www.wesleyan.edu/ip, dedicated to informing and advising the community on copyright law.

The website aims to aid fair sharing of resources.

“Intellectual property laws and policy are ambiguous and always changing, so our goal is to offer direction, clarify University policy, and make it (we hope) easier for faculty and staff to create and share information with students and colleagues legally,” said Victoria Stahl, assistant to the director at the Center for Faculty Career Development.

The site provides links to copyright law websites, live web chats with librarians ready to answer questions, University guidelines for fair use of copyrighted works, and answers to common IP questions.

“By committing itself to internal policing, the University protects students from the monitoring of federal government, and thus provides students with more freedom than they would otherwise have,” said WSA President Zach Kolodin ’07.

The IP agreement was produced through the collaboration of ITS, the Center for Faculty Career Development, Olin Library librarians, and the University Legal Council. Due to a technological error, many students found the IP agreement in their portfolio before ITS e-mailed a brief explanation of the agreement’s purpose.