Copyright Protection

Higher Education Opportunity Act Compliance

The Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) was signed into law in August of 2008. It describes the responsibilities of institutions of higher education to curb illegal downloading and distribution of copyrighted materials by students through institutional networks, and includes the following four requirements.

• Institutions must provide each fall and spring disclosures to students describing copyright law and campus policies related to violations of copyright law.
• Institutions must create plans to combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials by users of the institution's network, and the plan must include the use of one or more technology-based deterrents.
• Institutions must offer alternatives to illegal downloading.
• Institutions must periodically review their plans for effectiveness.

Annual Disclosure

Educating students on copyright law is an important part of reducing the illegal sharing of copyrighted materials. In compliance with HEOA, UA Cossatot uses the following methods to inform the campus community about HEOA and the university's response to copyright infringement.

• All UA Cossatot students, faculty, and staff must read and endorse the Acceptable Computer Use Policy before access will be granted to computing facilities.
• The Acceptable Computer Use Policy acknowledges unauthorized peer-to-peer sharing of copyrighted works such as music and movies as a violation of this code. (Section III, E, 2)
• An annual notice will be emailed directly to all enrolled students via their official student email address.
• Illegal sharing and copyright infringement is discussed in the Student Handbook.

Plans to Combat the Unauthorized Distribution of Copyrighted Material

UA Cossatot has implemented  technology-based deterrents that place limitations on peer-to-peer and other file sharing network traffic.

• At the border of our campus network,  a packet filtering and traffic inspection firewall is configured with policies specifically configured to restrict access to all external peer-to-peer network traffic.  These policies rely on traffic signatures and application identifiers, which are updated frequently as new peer-to-peer applications are identified.
• Our enpoint security solution has policies configured to identify and block access to applications associated with peer-to-peer file sharing.

Resources on Copyright Law

For alternatives to illegal file sharing, a list of reference material, and other important information, visit our Copyright Resources.