A major component of the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) of 2008 requires that colleges and universities (HEIs or Higher Education Institutions) proactively combat illegal file sharing. As a part of that effort, Saint Vincent College is reminding everyone that Saint Vincent College prohibits the illegal sharing of copyrighted material.

Graduated Response

The HEOA also requires that Saint Vincent College implement technology to combat illegal file sharing. This new technology known as Graduated Response (GR) will be activated soon. GR assigns points for certain policy violations. As these points accumulate, the system takes certain actions to prevent further violations. If the user continues to violate the College’s illegal file sharing policy, the user may be ultimately banished from the network entirely and will have to attend a hearing with Student Affairs to resume network access.

The College would like to encourage everyone to use pay services such as iTunes, Rhapsody, Amazon, ZunePass, and many others as legal alternatives to illegal file sharing.

Graduated Response Violations

The following table summarizes how points are assigned for various violations:

Reason	Points
Exchange of Registered Copyrighted Content	2
Exchange of Likely Commercial Music	1
Exchange of Likely Commercial Film and TV	1
Exchange of Likely Commercial Software and Games	1
Exchange of Likely Commercial eBooks	1
Exchange of Likely Sexual Content	1
Exchange of Likely Child Sexual Content	10
Likely P2P File Uploading	1
Use of Evasive P2P Client (one point per hour of usage)	1
Use of Aggressive P2P Client (one point per hour of usage)	1

Graduated Response Sanctions

If a user accumulates enough points to reach a sanction level, normal Internet access is interrupted and their browser is redirected to a special Web site. There the user will be required to read some materials and confirm they have been read. After confirmation, the End Sanction action will be started. Sanction levels, point total for each level, and end sanction durations:

Level	Point Total	End Sanction (after visiting Redirect Web site)
1	10	Immediately
2	20	3 hours
3	30	12 hours
4	40	reinstatement after hearing with Student Affairs

After the sanction period has expired, the user's computer will again be able to access Internet sites.