A new act requires that all colleges and universities make students aware of the criminal and civil penalties that accompany illegal downloading, but Boston University officials said they are still hammering out the details of recently reworked university policies that comply with the new standards.
Because some sections of the Aug. 14 Higher Education Opportunity Act set deadlines as far into the future as July 2010, BU Associate General Counsel Crystal Talley said the university is at leisure to ensure all conditions for the act can be met before plans are finalized before the administration reports back to the U.S. Department of Education.
‘We are in the process of reworking our policies in order to comply with the act, but it was just passed this summer,’ she said. ‘We have plenty of time to make sure everything is as it should be.”
Last month, 21 BU students were sued for illegal downloading and file sharing, and though Talley could not reveal specific information about which organization is suing the students, she hopes that, with HEOA, fewer students will be sued for this type of activity in the future.
The HEOA requirements, however, may end up costing universities more money per student compared to what they would spend promoting legal downloading, Ken Green, director for the Campus Computing Project, said. The project analyzes the amount of money various universities and colleges annually spend to prevent illegal file sharing.
‘An average university the size of BU can spend over $100,000 in one year trying to comply with the act and deter students from sharing files,’ Green said. ‘But it doesn’t have to be that way. It is so much cheaper to partner with a company like Ruckus and give students a way to download things legally and for free.’
Ruckus Network, Inc. is a website that allows students to download music for free. Any university or college can partner with Ruckus for free because the company’s revenues come from advertisements.
Large universities tend to partner with Ruckus because the service requires a sizable amount of bandwidth to work. Universities like BU also use a large bandwidth to serve all of the students across campus, Ruckus spokesman Chris Hood said.
BU is slowly making other changes to meet the HEOA deadlines, BU spokesman Colin Riley said. HEOA requires schools to send notifications to students about the consequences, which BU has done by handing out letters from the Dean of Students to freshmen when they register for BU’s computing network.
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