The Digital Millennium Copyright Act: What Does It Mean for Your Campus?

Citation

Cohen, J.A. (2000), "The Digital Millennium Copyright Act: What Does It Mean for Your Campus?", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 17 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2000.23917aac.006

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act: What Does It Mean for Your Campus?

Joel A. Cohen

Presenters at this session were Casey Lide and Garret Sem, policy analysts for EDUCAUSE. According to them, copyright infringement has cost institutions such as New York University large settlements. With the advent of the World Wide Web, the potential for copyright violation by anyone increases manyfold. Copyright holders actively attempt to find violations on the Web, and the institution as well as the individual may be held liable.

This is a general problem for commercial service providers, such as AOL, as well as universities. Though college campuses may prefer not to think of themselves as service providers, for the purposes of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), they are. By following the provisions of DMCA, a service provider can lower institutional liability for copyright infringements on their site.

A contact from each institution must register with the copyright office. Institutions do not have to police their site for violations, but if a copyright holder notifies the institution of a violation, the institution must "take down" the offending material within a reasonable amount of time. If the offender wishes to dispute the infringement there is an appeals procedure, and if the copyright holder does not respond, the questionable material may be reinstated. Repeat offenders lose their right to the computer system service. (A resource area for DMCA may be found at http://www.educause.edu/issues/dmca.html)

It is important to orient the academic community toward good copyright citizenship. (Sample policies on copyright may be found at http://www.educause.edu/issues/policy.html) Without acceptable explanation, the idea of "take down" will be an anathema to those holding academic freedom in high regard.

Even with explanation, there are elements of the DMCA that may need legal clarification and certainly need to be addressed in campus policies. Most of the assembled felt that some of these issues would have to be tested in court:

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  What is a reasonable time period between notification and "take down"?

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  Should the owner be notified and asked for voluntary removal before "take down"?

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  How do you deal with "take down" if the offending material is on a student's computer in the residence halls? Is removing the student's computer from the network a disproportional remedy to the alleged infringement?

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  How will institutions deal with repeat offenders, particularly in the case of tenured faculty? Consider the scenario where a faculty member posts his or her own work to a Web site, but the copyright to the work has been transferred to a publisher. Will the institution ban the faculty member from the computer system?

One complaint was that transferring the copyright office contact from one person to another was extremely difficult. A related problem is that the copyright office database is not searchable. EDUCAUSE will bring these matters to the attention of the copyright office.

Joel A. Cohen is Director of Information Technology Services and Interim Director of the Library, Canisius College, Buffalo, New York. cohen@canisius.edu