VCOM Faculty Handbook

The DMCA has five titles, or sections, with Title II having the most immediate impact on the VCOM community. Title II outlines certain legal duties with which Online Service Providers (OSPs) must comply in order to limit their legal liabilities in the event a user of their service violates copyright laws. An OSP is defined as "an entity offering the transmission, routing, or providing of connections for digital online communications". For purposes of the DMCA, Virginia Tech is regarded as an OSP for users of the VCOM information technology infrastructure. Pursuant to the DMCA, an OSP is required to name an official agent with the US Copyright Office. This agent is the designated official to be notified by a copyright holder in the event of an alleged copyright infringement by anyone who utilizes that OSP. Since Virginia Tech is the OSP for VCOM, Virginia Tech has designated such an agent. The OSP is obligated to inform users when their accounts and services will be terminated due to repeated violation of copyright or other intellectual property laws. When Virginia Tech receives a complaint takedown notice for infringed activity of copyrighted material emanating from any public facing VCOM servers or shared social website, VCOM’s Vice President for Operations and Assistant Vice President of IT Operations are notified immediately. VCOM’s IT Department will expeditiously remove or disable access to infringing activity. No Electronic Theft Act Congress enacted the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act in 1997 to facilitate prosecution of copyright violation on the internet. The NET Act makes it a federal crime to reproduce, distribute, or share copies of electronic copyrighted works such as songs, movies, games, or software programs, even if the person copying or distributing the material acts without commercial purpose and/or receives no private financial gain. Before this law took effect, people who intentionally distributed copied software over the internet did not face criminal penalties if they did not profit from their actions. Electronic copyright infringement carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison and a $250,000 fine. The NET Act is applicable in situations such as running a file sharing application with outgoing transfers enabled, hosting files on a web account, transferring files through IRC, and other methods of making copyrighted material available over networks. Industry organizations such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have filed copyright infringement lawsuits against individual college students who have used a file sharing program to download copyrighted material. P2P file sharing programs were developed to allow distribution and/or shared access to digitally stored information, such as computer programs, multimedia (music and video), documents, or electronic books. While some P2P technologies are legitimate, others are not. Most commercially produced music and movies are copyrighted and cannot be freely shared. Using P2P file sharing software to distribute copyrighted materials without the permission of the copyright holder is illegal and violates US copyright law. Citation Use of materials without citing appropriate references is considered unethical. When quoting materials from other sources, the source must be cited in text and in a reference list. Images are also subject to citation guidelines. If another VCOM instructor developed all or parts of a PowerPoint, their contribution must be cited appropriately, giving proper credit to the original author for their work. This may be done in the title slide or the reference slide.

80