Re: RIAA DMCA notices malformed this school year

["Paul B. Henson" <henson () ACM ORG>]

On Tue, 9 Sep 2008, Tracy Mitrano wrote:

> This event is a good time to remind everyone that the 512(c) safe harbor
> provisions that establish the DMCA agent registration with the LOC is for
> when the alleged infringement derives from the ISPs servers, i.e. an
> institutional device, and is not a required procedure for conduit
> connections, i.e. between two computers that the ISP (institution) does
> not own.

We receive occasional DMCA notices for infringement coming from our
residential student networks. We had assumed we were required to take
action on these. I did some initial review of the 512(c) section you
mentioned, and it does indeed seem that given these infringements are
taking place from the student's personal computer and only traversing our
network, we are not required to respond to the DMCA notice. The only
requirement seems to be that some type of AUP be in place such that "repeat
infringers" have their access to the network terminated. Yet, there is no
clear definition of "repeat infringer", I read in one place that
theoretically "multiple guilty verdicts in a court of law" could be
considered a reasonable definition of "repeat infringer", I don't think
anyone would currently meet that definition.

As much as I would like to simply drop these annoying DMCA takedown
requests for P2P into the bit bucket, I don't think our management would be
on board. Tracy, does Cornell simply disregard DMCA takedowns where the
infringement takes place on a student computer? Any other universities with
such a policy I could use as a precedent?


--
Paul B. Henson  |  (909) 979-6361  |  http://www.csupomona.edu/~henson/
Operating Systems and Network Analyst  |  henson () csupomona edu
California State Polytechnic University  |  Pomona CA 91768