DMCA Compliance

Procedures for Dealing with Possible Infringement of DMCA Regulations

USF complies with the requirements put forth by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. USF will expeditiously investigate any alleged case of infraction on copyrighted material available on its computing network and take appropriate action.

DMCA Agent
Gerard D. Solis
General Counsel
University of South Florida
Office of the General Counsel
4202 E. Fowler Ave., CGS 301
Tampa, 33620
Tel: (813) 974-2131
Fax: (813) 974-5236

Requirements for Investigation

All notices of claimed copyright infringements must be addressed to the campus DMCA Agent and contain:

• Name and contact information of the complaining party.
• Clear identification of the work(s) claimed to be infringed.
• Identification of the material infringing that copyright, including an electronic location (URL or IP number) and time stamp with the appropriate time zone indicating when the material was last seen.
• A statement by the owner of the copyrighted material indicating that there is good faith belief that the material in question is in fact a violation of the DMCA rules.
• A statement indicating that the complaining party is either the copyright holder or a representative authorized to act on behalf of the owner.

Notification and Removal of Material

Upon receipt of notification, the USF's Incident Response Team will investigate and track down the offending material. Local users linked with the material will be notified of the transgression and instructed to remove the copyrighted material from the computer. A note of compliance is expected from the user within two (2) work days. If such notice is not received within that period, network access to that computer will be removed and the user instructed to contact the Incident Response Team in person or over the phone, at (813) 974-2287.

Users will also be referred to the Office of Student Rights and Responsibilities who will get in contact with the user for each violation to further discuss the incident and what can be done to prevent future infractions.

Log Retention

Identification of the correct user responsible for the copyright violation will depend on the correlation of several data logs across the entire University campus. These logs are also under the responsibility of different IT units, and have different retention policies. The following are the posted data log retention policies for required logs within some of the units on campus:

• Information Technology: 8 weeks
• St. Pete Residence Halls: 8 weeks
• Tampa Residence Halls: 8 weeks
• Tampa Wireless Network: 8 weeks