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 a campus mainframe or network.
Some institutional licenses permit copying for certain purposes.
If you are unsure about the use of a particular software product, ask the librarian or someone in Academic Computing before making a copy. It is illegal for a faculty member or student to copy software for distribution among the members of a class, without permission of the author or publisher. Alternatives to explore Software can be expensive. You may think that you cannot afford to purchase certain programs that you need. But there are legal alternatives to unauthorized copying.