DMCA guidelines that Cornell students must abide by

The Cornell University has posted a message about File Sharing on their network. The University received over sixty notices of copyright infringement under the DMCA. They didn't send it to the student but to the Internet service providers because they are held liable for contributory copyright violations. A small quote from their text:

The distribution of copyrighted materials over the Internet for which the distributor (any server '” including your computer) does not have permission can be violation of federal criminal law, a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 ("DMCA"). Most of the music, games or videos downloaded through file-sharing programs like Morpheus or KaZaa lack permission of the copyright owner. Moreover, those very programs that enable you or that you use to download programs automatically open file-sharing services from your computer. Thus, without your knowing it explicitly, by downloading the program and the files, your computer is programmed to share it back out into the international Internet community. You are then therefore liable to be in violation of the DMCA, even if all you did was download a single song. Each criminal offense carries with it a minimum fine of $30,000 and a potential jail sentence.

For the average student who is downloading and serving copyrighted files without permission of the owner on the Internet the odds that they will be identified, arrested and sent to federal prison are probably quite small. The individual mentioned above had focused tremendous resources in a coordinated effort to serve copyrighted materials. The recreational downloading of copyrighted materials is not without its consequences, however. It is a violation of both federal law and university policy. And it is a law enforced not only by federal investigators, but also by the owners of copyrighted materials. Moreover, there is some smaller number of students who do intentionally engage in this volume of activity on the Cornell network; they should know that they are at a greater risk for federal prosecution of copyright violations.

So you cannot even run P2P file sharing programs even if you don't download anything.

Thanks to zeropaid for bringing the message from the university to our attention.

Source: cornell.edu