Policy and Law: Campus

Peer-to-peer file sharing remains a major headache for campus IT administrators, as the RIAA and MPAA aggressively explore the boundaries of litigation and legislation. This session will feature two panels of experts to discuss where we stand. The first panel will review the best current thinking on campus policy and technology options for coping with P2P issues: How to deal with DMCA notices, prelitigation letters, and John Doe lawsuits, and whether blocking and filtering technologies have matured to the point where they can help. The second panel will look at the current status of federal P2P legislation and also describe recent entertainment industry initiatives to enact such legislation at the state level.

In the case of providing e-mail services for a college or university, perhaps providing nothing is actually the best option. Fifteen years ago, building campus e-mail systems made sense; however, these systems are now slow and have limited functionality in comparison with commercial products. There are enough e-mail providers today that higher education institutions cannot even compete.

The challenge of web accessibility raises issues of both policy and technology. This session features experts in each of these two areas.

Policy guru Tracy Mitrano says: "Developing a web accessibility policy has been one of the greatest but most rewarding challenges I have faced in creating an IT policy framework at Cornell. With the EDUCAUSE Live! audience, I would like to share some of the struggles and stories about that process and what accessibility, education, and the web have come to mean to me as a result."

Technology expert Harry Hochheiser summarizes: "Although the need for accessible web sites is widely accepted, many developers are still uncertain about the costs and limitations associated with designs that account for users with varying skills, capabilities, and computing tools. Fortunately, these problems are solvable: with proper planning and design, web sites can be interactive, engaging, highly functional, and accessible. The combination of accessibility guidelines and automated evaluation tools can help any developer build sites that are more accessible and usable for all users."

Everyone wants to know how to "be secure." The myriad higher ed compliance requirements, coupled with a constantly dynamic attacker strategy, have made this question more difficult than ever to answer. Come talk with representatives from three institutions that managed to craft a rational, coherent strategy for standardizing security.

"What challenges remain with this killer app? I suggest three: (1) user education, especially for adolescents and their parents; (2) new features connecting higher education's missions to the popular site; and (3) legal and policy considerations on a global scale."

"File sharing serves as a tuning fork for an entirely new orchestra of digital communication, interaction, and social expectation. We in higher education must provide a clear, calm, ringing voice in defining
the terms of the new world when we believe our goals and values are important not only to us but to society."

Personal privacy is about protecting individuals and them control over their personal information. Institutional privacy is about protecting proprietary information. In either case, privacy requirements must reflect campus values and also meet the institution's legal and regulatory obligations. The requirements must be reflected in the identity management system: its flexibility, how it is used to support access to resources, and who makes the decisions about that access. IAM can provide for the externalization and consolidation of roles that can be used to determine permissions and access without that function being built into each resource. This session will discuss these topics from the auditor, identity management architect, and security staff perspectives and offer a case study on how one campus has addressed these issues.