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Copyright at UVa: Employees

Violation Notices

Here is the process of how notifications are handled at UVa. when a media company contacts UVa for reasons of a possible violation.

Industries that rely heavily on the creation and sale of digital materials - like record companies, movie studios, and software vendors - monitor the Internet aggressively to detect and prosecute violations of their copyrights. When one of these agencies discovers what it believes to be a copyright infringement by a computer on the UVa network, it triggers the following chain of events:

  1. The agency sends a violation notice to the University administration. (See a sample violation notice)
  2. The University generally does not monitor the network for content and does not itself generate copyright violation notices to its network users. However, given receipt of this notification, the University will undertake an internal investigation to determine whether its network has been used in a manner inconsistent with law or the University’s Respect for Copyrights of Digital Materials and Software Policy and take appropriate action, if necessary.
  3. Employees identified in the investigation receive an email notifying them of their required response. A copy of this message is also provided to the University Audit Department, University Employee Relations, and their department head to make them aware of the complaint we received.

While it may well be that a copyright violator is unaware that his activity is illegal - or that someone else has used security vulnerabilities on his computer to conduct illegal activity without his knowledge - he is still responsible for how his computer is used. If you need some guidance on how to secure your machine against hackers and other threats, visit our security site at http://its.virginia.edu/security/ and follow the link for users of personal computers.

Counter-notification

If you are certain that you are legally using the material the copyright owner says you are infringing upon, or that the copyright owner has misidentified the material, you can file a counter-notice - after you remove the specified material from your computer or network access to your machine has been disabled.

Find out more about counter-notification

Page Updated: 2011-06-30

Standards & Policy

University of Virginia
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UVa Help Desk: 434-924-HELP (434-924-4357) • 4help@virginia.edu

Page Updated: 2011-06-30; © 2012 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia.

The information contained on the University of Virginia’s Department of Information Technology Services (ITS) website is provided as a public service with the understanding that ITS makes no representations or warranties, either expressed or implied, concerning the accuracy, completeness, reliability or suitability of the information, including warrantees of title, non-infringement of copyright or patent rights of others. These pages are expected to represent the University of Virginia community and the State of Virginia in a professional manner in accordance with the University of Virginia’s Computing Policies.