The Recording Industry Association of America released its ninth wave of pre-litigation letters Thursday, which did not include any UW-Madison students, but contained an attachment telling univeresities the best ways to deal with illegal file sharers.
The attchment, titled Best Practices for Combating Illegal File Sharing on University Networks,"" provided a step-by-step approach to addressing illegal file sharing on campuses.
The guide outlined four major components.
The first recommends universities adopt a strong, acceptable use policy and clearly inform students on guidelines.
Brian Rust, communications manager of UW-Madison's Division of Information Technology, said the university has an appropriate use policy.
""We had one long before the RIAA ever contacted us,"" he said. ""When you are a brand new student and you register to get your NetID, you have to click through the appropriate use policy.""
Cara Duckworth of the RIAA said the ""Best Practices Guide"" is mostly for university administrators to see how other universities have decreased piracy rates and have established criteria to enforce policy.
Rust said UW-Madison already has a progressive punishment policy largely coordinated through housing and the dean of students.
He said the policy, which is available on ResNet, establishes increasingly harsh penalties for each successive piracy-related infraction.
UW-Madison is mostly on par with the RIAA's suggestions on the best practices list, deviating from the list only when addressing the issue of implementing technologies to prevent misuse of campus networks.
Rust said the RIAA wants universities to institute a more-encompassing screening system.
""Ultimately [what] they would like us to do is to filter all of the files so that you would not be able to send or receive point-to-point file-share files on the campus network,"" he said.
""We've made it clear we are not going to do that because that will hinder legal file sharing.""
He explained students who might need to view a podcast or some other audio or video file for school would be denied the ability to do homework if the university decided to block such files from the network.
RIAA also suggests universities facilitate access to convenient, inexpensive and legal alternatives.
However, again Rust said UW-Madison does not intend to include this in its own anti-piracy campaign. ""We manage our own community and we feel that we are doing it appropriately,"" Rust said.
""We will continue to do what we need to, to try to dissuade the university community from breaking copyright law. We would love to have the RIAA contribute toward those efforts rather than simply expect us to do all the heavy lifting.
