Major battles, both nationally and internationally, are being fought over what intellectual property rights should be in cyberspace. We see one side of these battles in the continuing online music revolution spawned by Napster and its successors, software that ties together individual online music collections into an apparent single, gigantic database of freely downloadable music. Millions of people worldwide continue to trade music, videos and software freely -- and often illegally -- over the Internet.

We see another side of these battles through the Business Software Alliance, which urges that all software in use be properly licensed, lest it pursue such misuse (often achieving large settlements for non-compliance). The Internet has made software piracy possible on a large scale, but perhaps even more worrisome to software vendors is the often casual way in which people infringe copyrights -- for example, purchasing one copy of Microsoft Office but installing it on two computers.

Casual infringement often speaks to something more than the effect of technologies giving rise to new capabilities, good and bad. Sometimes, it is the perception of a battle between good and evil, leading to a feeling that the "evil" laws can be ignored. More often, it is because of something simple, like ignorance of license agreements even though the "accept" button has been clicked on downloaded software. Regardless, such casual infringement has been often undetectable or ignored because it is such "small potatoes," particularly if no profits were made.

Neither is so true any more. With infringement rampant in the cyberspace world, content owners have begun to fight back along many fronts. Media attention has focused on large-scale operations by law enforcement agencies used to combat software piracy and on high-profile legal initiatives aimed at curbing technologies and services commonly used for digital piracy. (You may have seen recent press reports about a major U.S. Customs Service "raid" on a software piracy organization called DrinkOrDie, involved with distributing pirated software and videos using business and academic institutional resources. UCLA was one of the named institutions.)

Equally significant is the rapidly increasing use of automated technology by companies to ferret out illegal trading of MP3 files, pirated software and digital videos. And companies like Microsoft are using technology to aggressively enforce the licensing restrictions on their products.

These efforts to curb infringement can and do affect us on campus. We need to ensure that licenses for all software have been appropriately acquired, particularly as some software licenses are complicated and easily misunderstood, and many are changing significantly. We also need to understand the university policies that govern the use of electronic resources. The cornerstone policy in this area is the UC Electronic Commu-nications Policy (available at www.icompass.ucla.edu), which articulates the allowable uses of university electronic resources, including personal, incidental use. The national and international debates will continue to help shape the contours of intellectual property rights in cyberspace. In the meantime, we all need to pay attention to their effects on our daily lives at UCLA.

Wada is UCLA's information technology security coordinator. Davis is associate vice chancellor of information technology.