Copyright

Copyright issues are often confusing, at best.  Whether you're a student trying to complete an assignment, or you're a faculty or staff member putting together course materials, the rules governing the use of copyrighted materials may seem to be an obstacle if you aren't familiar with them.  Thankfully, the University has many resources available on the subject so you can make sure you're doing the right thing.

Be Proactive

Penn State's Copyright Perspectives site is a great place to start for information on fair use, the TEACH act, and other aspects of copyright law.  The site presents several scenarios typically encountered by students and explores the right and wrong ways in which they should be handled.

The Provost's office created the Legal Media site to highlight issues of academic integrity and legal sources for accessing music and video.

For those students living in campus housing, Residential Computing's page on copyright infringement details what, exactly, that is and how it could affect your Internet connection in your room.

Do you want information on copyright law straight from the source?  Then check out the United States Copyright Office website.


If You Receive a Notice

When a copyright holder detects an infringement upon their work by someone connected to a Penn State network, they notify our office.  We, in turn, notify the user who allegedly infringed upon the copyright holder's work, then refer the case to either the Office of Student Conduct or the Office of Human Resources, as appropriate.  In this role, SOS is simply a conduit for information -- we do not make recommendations to these offices, we simply report the information given to us by the copyright holder and correlate it with access logs to identify the account in use on the specified resource at the reported time.