Overview

SCENARIO
Revising a Campus File-Sharing Policy 20

• PURPOSE

Protect the university legally and educate users about why they should not illegally share files on the campus network

• AUDIENCE

Primarily the university community, but potentially also lawyers and courts

• CONTEXT

The campus computer support department

• TEXT

Official policy statement (around 3,000 words), including concrete examples

Overview

1

As part of your internship at your university’s Information Technology (IT) support department, you’ve been assigned to serve as the student rep on a campus file-sharing policy committee, which also includes several faculty and staff members. Students and faculty alike have increasingly complained about the campus network speed. The IT Department consistently points the finger at students downloading pirated music, movies, and applications. The university president agrees.

You may already have opinions about file sharing — the different legal and illegal uses of file sharing as well as whether the illegal uses are also unethical. In this scenario, however, your role — your actual job — is to represent the university’s position. You need the internship credit to graduate, so quitting or being fired are not attractive options.

Your campus already has an “acceptable use” policy that covers illegal file sharing (see the Background Texts section), but the new president has reviewed the document and isn’t happy with it. In his opinion, the dense legalese used in the document is part of the problem: People can’t read it or understand it. So he has charged your committee to do background research and create a new policy from scratch.

In his e-mail to the committee (see Background Texts section), the president makes it clear that the policy must fulfill several functions: It must not only protect the university from lawsuits but also educate users about why sharing files illegally is a bad idea, and the new policy should help to improve the speed of the overburdened campus network.

Your committee’s work involves two primary steps:

  1. Do background research on the legal issues surrounding illegal file sharing. Most of these are contained in legislation called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Write a short memo outlining the main requirements of the legislation, citing sources for your information, that the committee and the president will use in reviewing the new policy to make sure it’s legally sound.
  2. Create a new
    2
    draft policy for your own campus. Note that the policy has different motives and audiences than the memo you drafted in step 1 (which was for internal committee use). The policy needs to inform and persuade the campus community (including students, faculty, and staff).

You’re not sure how this happened, but as the first committee meeting ends, you find that you’ve agreed to write the internal memo and first draft of the policy.