In August 2008, the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) was signed into federal law. Along with numerous other conditions, the updated law requires all campuses take steps to combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material.
There are several organizations and business that actively searches for the illegal distribution of copyrighted material. Upon discovery of the illegal activity, a notice is sent to the owner of the IP address space from which the protected material is being distributed.
On the first offense, your network access will be denied until you have indicated that you understand that you must not use SIU resources to illegal share copyrighted material. On the second offense, students will be referred to Student Rights & Responsibilities office, and university employees will be referred to their Dean or Vice Chancellor.
Each computer on the data network must have a unique address known as an IP Address. The IP Address can be thought of as being similar to the addresses used for houses. Your computer is configured to request an IP address when it is connected to the network. A log entry with a time stamp is made for each IP address request which includes your network ID. The copyright infringement notices includes the IP address that was illegally sharing the protected material and the time it was doing so. A correlation is made between the information in the notice and the log entry.
