Copyright:

As a community of artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers and scholars whose careers will be spent creating intellectual property, we encourage our entire community to respect the property of others. Downloading anything onto your machine from untrustworthy P2P sources or Web sites not only exposes you to viruses, worms and spyware, but often violates the Copyright laws, and can lead to suspension of network privileges, or to lawsuits from Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), or the Business Software Alliance (BSA). Please remember that theft is a crime, and that nothing in cyberspace is truly anonymous.

Copyright protections are created when words are put on paper, transmittes via email, music is recorded, software is written, or images are created. Once done, the work is protected by copyright. If someone else wants to use the work, they must get permission from its creator.

Copyrighted material includes almost all forms of original expression fixed in tangible medium even if no formal copyright notice is filed or attached. However, you cannot copyright any idea, process, system, method of operation, concept or principle, regardless of the form in which it is described. 

Copyright infrigement is any reproduction (download), display, distribution (upload), creation of derivative works, or public performance of copyrighted work without permission of the copyright owner.

Federal Copyright Law and College Policy prohibit the copying and/or distribution of copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright owner. Copyrighted materials include but are not limited to Text, graphics, art, photographs, music, film, and software. 

Peer-to-peer (P2P) software such as BitTorrent that is often used to share music movies and other media may lead to violation of copyright law. Most P2P software automatically shares anything that you download by default - so if you downloaded the latest Hollywood blockbuster to watch it , you would also be helping to distribute an illegal copy to others by sharing the contents of your machine with the world.

If you use any P2P software, you should disable its file sharing component. The University of Chicago has a web site with details on disabling file-sharing for most P2P software. 

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) - "Notice and Take Down"

The College must remove or disable access to material reported to be in violation of copyright law under the DMCA’s “notice and take down” provision. When the College receives a complaint from a copyright holder (or their agent) regarding an alleged copyright infringement, they will notify the person that has been identified as the owner of the computer in question and remove that resident’s network access.

The DMCA can be reviewed at: http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf

An overview of the act can be found at: http://www.arl.org/info/frn/copy/osp.html

To report alleged copyright infringements on Purchase College computers, please contact the College's designated DMCA Agent:

Bill Junor
Director of Computing and Telecommunications Services 
Purchase College, SUNY
735 Anderson Hill Rd.
Purchase, NY 10577
Tel. 914.251.6460
Fax 914.251.6476

College Computer Network Users: if you lose access due to an alleged violation

If you receive an official notice from the College of an alleged copyright violation and have had your network access disabled, please contact the Office of Student Affairs to find out how you can have your network access restored:

Office of the Vice President
for Student Affairs
CCS 3004
Purchase College
735 Anderson Hill Rd.
Purchase, NY 10577-1400
(914) 251-6030
Fax: (914) 251-6034
student-affairs@purchase.edu