When students logged into their e-portfolios to finalize their schedules this week, they needed to accept an intellectual property contract in order to proceed.
The contract, which acknowledges that all members of the Wesleyan community are legally bound to respect the copyrights of intellectual property, applies to scholarly materials, as well as software, videos, and music.
While we agree that scholarly material should not be illegally shared, and we acknowledge that sharing other copyrighted material without permission is illegal, we believe that the University can do a better job of informing the community about the details of file-sharing. A campus wide e-mail explaining the logistics of file sharing, rather than one that merely informed us to click “accept,” would have been a useful supplement to the agreement itself.
The agreement demonstrates that the University is aware of the existence of illegal file sharing and is taking a proactive approach against it. In this vein, the e-portfolio agreement was drawn up to avoid possible lawsuits against members of the Wesleyan community, a laudable cause for any student that just purchased textbooks for the semester.
Still, another intention of the agreement was to raise awareness of intellectual property issues within the community. In the past, students caught sharing files claimed they were unaware that they were even sharing copyrighted files with others. ITS should educate the community on how to check file sharing settings.
The University should take an invested interest in keeping its students out of trouble. We applaud the efforts of ITS to not track individual users despite the existence of such technology, and advocated by the RIAA and MPAA.
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