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Intellectual honesty is the foundation of our academic lives. Original thought and proper credit for others' work is central to learning and teaching. Like plagiarism, violation of copyright is a serious breach of the commitment to intellectual integrity that you made when you came to Columbia.
As a member of the Columbia community, you have access to the
Internet and World Wide Web—from a departmental or personal
computer or your CUNIX account. We hope that you will take
advantage of this privilege. Please remember that you
are responsible for what you do including complying with
copyright law—whether using the Web to read or publish
pages or using file-sharing programs like Kazaa, Gnutella,
IRC, FTP, or others.
You must respect copyright. Copyright protection covers
any original work of authorship that is fixed in some tangible
medium of expression. To be original does not mean that
it has to have any literary merit. Even ordinary e-mail messages
or postings are protected by copyright. Nor does the creator
have to do anything for a work to be protected by copyright.
A work is protected from the moment it is created, and it
does not have to contain a copyright notice to qualify for
protection.
What this broad coverage means is that just about any work you come
across, including software, books, music, film,
video, articles, cartoons, pictures, and e-mail,
whether on the Internet, a CD, DVD, or tape, is
likely to be protected by copyright. Copyright
law prohibits anyone from copying, distributing,
making derivative works, publicly displaying or
publicly performing a copyrighted work unless
the user has the express permission of the
copyright owner or the user qualifies under one
of the legal exceptions, the most common of
which is "fair use." Fair use is a complex
doctrine that does not provide clear rules about
which uses are fair and which are not. However,
"fair use" almost never allows the distribution
of a complete work, or even significant portions
of one. The sharing of copyrighted music, film
or other media, via a file sharing programs like
Kazaa, Morpheus and Gnutella is virtually never
a fair use. For more information on fair use,
and other legal exceptions, see
the Columbia Policy Library. For more
information on copyright law see the sites
listed below.
All network users must comply with federal copyright law.
Violations of copyright law are also violations of University
policy. (See Computer Use Policy) Copying, distributing,
sharing, downloading, or uploading any information or material
on the Internet may infringe the copyright for that information
or material.
The University must take appropriate action under the terms
of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, if it receives
notice of copyright infringement. A notice of infringement
could be a notice from a record or film industry representative
that copyrighted music or a film is being downloaded and
distributed without the permission of the copyright owner.
Among other things, the University is legally required to
take action to cause the infringing activity to cease. Actions
may also include invalidation of an e-mail account, disconnecting
a network port, and a report to the appropriate dean or
manager for disciplinary action. In the case of repeat infringers,
the University is required under the law to take away the
infringer's computer account and terminate all access to
our network.
In addition to any University action, the copyright owner
may also take further legal action against the individual
concerned.
File-sharing programs automatically distribute files. Please
be aware that programs like Kazaa, Morpheus, and Gnutella
automatically turn on sharing when installed. If you use
such programs, please ensure that you are not violating
copyright by default, e.g., by sharing music or other media
files or software you have loaded on your computer. Even
unintentional infringement violates the law.
General Information on Copyright is available at:
U S Copyright
Office
Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (Download
free Adobe Acrobat Reader)
University
of Texas Crash Course in Copyright
EDUCAUSE
Reference Library Institute for Academic Technology
MUSIC (Music United
for Strong Internet Copyright) Coalition
The Recording Industry
Association of America
Brad
Templeton's 10 Copyright Myths (Clarinet News Publisher)
Copyright © Trustees of Columbia University in the
City of New York
2003.01.10
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