It may, however, be legal to loan your software to a friend temporarily as long as you do not keep a copy. Lack of copy-protection does NOT constitute permission to copy software in order to share or sell it. Software acquired by colleges and universities is usually licensed. The licenses restrict how and where the software may be legally used by members of the community. This applies to software installed on hard disks in microcomputer clusters, software distributed on disks by a campus lending library and software available on other campus computers or network.
Some institutional licenses permit copying for certain purposes.
Consult your campus computing organization if you are unsure about the use of a particular software product. It is illegal for a faculty member or student to copy software for distribution among members of a class without permission of the author or publisher. You should check carefully each piece of software and the accompanying documentation yourself. The facilities, however, are limited and should not be used frivolously. Resources should be respected by all as valuable property for academic pursuit.