Category: Campus-Piracy
June 17, 2010, 04:00 PM ET
Dispute Over File Sharing's Harm to Music Sales Plays Again
Last week in Vienna, where Beethoven, Haydn, and Mahler once walked, scholars came together to argue about Radiohead, file sharing, and the economics of music.
At a conference known as Vienna Music Business Research Days, two American economists renewed their long-running dispute about whether or not peer-to-peer file sharing is responsible for the worldwide decline in CD sales.
The quarrel centers on a widely cited paper by Felix Oberholzer-Gee, a professor at the Harvard Business School, and Koleman Strumpf, who now teaches at the University of Kansas. Mr. Oberholzer-Gee and Mr. Strumpf argued that file sharing does not have a net negative effect on the recorded-music industry. They arrived at that conclusion by examining the relationships among American record sales, American file sharing, and school holidays in Germany during the last quarter of 2002. (If file sharing injures CD...
Read MoreJune 3, 2010, 04:00 PM ET
Canadian Education Groups Seek Changes in Newly Proposed Copyright Law
Some professors and students in Canada are grumbling about a new copyright-reform bill that was introduced there Wednesday, saying that it would lead to new restrictions on the use of media in classrooms, distance learning, and libraries.
The proposed law is designed to make it easier to go after commercial pirates while allowing individuals to copy legally obtained content from one device to another and to make backup copies. But critics say the bill's protection of so-called digital locks—encryption that publishers place on music, movie, or software files to keep them from being illegally copied—could make it impossible for users to do things that are technically legal, like making copies for educational use.
"The government has struck some pretty good compromises over all, but the one place where they didn't compromise at all was with digital locks, and that's incredibly...
Read MoreMarch 2, 2010, 03:40 PM ET
British Universities Object to Having to Monitor Open Wireless Networks
Universities in Britain are alarmed about proposed legislation that could require institutions offering open wireless networks to monitor users to ensure that they comply with online copyright provisions, the BBC reports.
The Digital Economy Bill, which is making its way through the British Parliament, "imposes obligations on Internet service providers to reduce online copyright infringement," a bill summary says. The new measures could result in large fines and network slowdowns or disconnections for providers of networks on which persistent infringements, such as music or movie piracy, are taking place.
The Society of College, National and University Libraries, whose members include all universities in Britain and Ireland, said in a statement that it welcomes the bill in principle, but that its "proposals for tackling online copyright infringement are something of a threat to us."...
Read MoreApril 17, 2009, 08:49 AM ET
Judge Bars the Internet From the Courtroom in a File-Sharing Case
So much for the long-awaited, fiercely contested Webcast in the recording industry’s hottest piracy case. A federal appellate judge ruled today that it cannot happen.
Charles Nesson, a Harvard Law School professor, had asked to Webcast a court hearing in the case against his client Joel Tenenbaum, a graduate student at Boston University whom Sony BMG Music Entertainment sued for copyright infringement. The presiding federal judge, Nancy Gertner, approved the request in January. But the recording industry, fearing that the hearing in U.S. District Court in Boston would become a circus, appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
Today, that court barred the Webcast, which was to be recorded by the Courtroom View Network and carried gavel to gavel by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Judicial rules close federal courtrooms in Massachusetts to all...
Read MoreMarch 23, 2009, 04:12 PM ET
Justice Department Favors Recording Industry's Position in Copyright Case
A defendant in a lawsuit who asks the federal government to intervene in his case might be careful what he wishes for.
The U.S. Department of Justice rejected over the weekend the argument that the recording industry’s litigation against alleged copyright infringers is unconstitutional. Charles R. Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School defending Joel Tenenbaum, a student at Boston University being sued by Sony BMG Music Entertainment, had asked the Justice Department in February to prevent copyright holders from collecting statutory damages except from offenders seeking commercial gain.
The Justice Department fiercely denied that request, in a 31-page memo filed on Saturday.
“The remedy of statutory damages has been a cornerstone of our federal copyright law since 1790,” the agency said. Even copyright violations not motivated by profits limit the legal distribution of...
Read MoreMarch 12, 2009, 04:33 PM ET
Student's Defense Against Recording Industry Hits Snags
Joel Tenenbaum, poster child for opposition to the recording industry’s mass-lawsuit campaign, has won much sympathy (and many Twitter followers), but going has been tough lately.
This week the federal judge on Mr. Tenenbaum’s case admonished his legal team, led by Charles R. Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School and founder of its Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The judge, Nancy Gertner, denied a motion they had filed, calling it “plainly flawed,” and suggested that they were not, as judicial rules require, conferring “in good faith” with the other side, the recording industry.
“Nothing entitles the defendant to engraft his own conditions on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure or the local rules of this court,” Judge Gertner wrote, “or to dispense with them where they fail to suit his counsel’s teaching style.”
Students in Mr. Nesson’s “CyberOne” course have been ...
Read MoreMarch 6, 2009, 04:23 PM ET
Blanket-Licensing Proponent Not Quite Preaching to the 'Choruss'
The collapse of online music services like Ruckus has left a void in students’ legal downloading options, which the recording industry promotes, colleges encourage, and federal law now requires them to offer.
Enter Choruss, a new blanket-licensing system that would bill colleges and compensate artists based on how much music students were downloading. The project, financed by Warner Music Group, is still in the works, and its president, Jim Griffin, has been out and about lately taking questions.
Last week he spoke to music-industry types at a conference of Digital Music Forum East, and this week he checked in with campus officials in an online chat with Educause. In the latter, Mr. Griffin appealed to educators’ sense of intellectual property. “It’s become voluntary,” he said, “to pay for music products.”
His solution: to pursue “intelligent monetization” by working with...
Read MoreFebruary 19, 2009, 12:55 PM ET
Judges Will Weigh Whether to 'Admit the Internet Into the Courtroom'
The most visible defendant in the recording industry’s supposedly dwindling mass-lawsuit campaign may still get his day in court Webcast — just not next week, a federal appellate judge decided yesterday.
Joel Tenenbaum, backed by Harvard Law School, has become a poster child for opposition to the recording industry’s copyright-infringement litigation. A graduate student at Boston University, Mr. Tenenbaum was sued for illegally downloading seven copyrighted songs. Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society is fighting to stream his case online.
Last month a federal judge in Massachusetts, Nancy Gertner, ruled for a Webcast of a pre-trial hearing — filmed by the Courtroom View Network and carried gavel-to-gavel by the Berkman Center — but the recording industry appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and several...
Read MoreFebruary 9, 2009, 03:37 PM ET
Razing Ruckus
Students will download songs and movies one way or another, so part of deterring piracy is offering free, legal resources. But now a go-to option for many colleges, Ruckus, has dropped out of the dwindling business.
“Unfortunately the Ruckus service will no longer be provided,” says a message that reportedly replaced Ruckus’s Web site on Friday evening. “Thanks.”
The Chronicle’s calls to the company’s headquarters, in Herndon, Va., were not immediately returned on Monday.
Colleges began signing up for Ruckus five years ago, and in 2005, almost one in five was considering a subscription to a music or movie service, according to a survey by the education-technology group Educause. At first Ruckus charged for campuswide access, but by 2006 it had shifted its focus from site licenses to advertising, still requiring colleges to sign deals, but not to pay.
Record-company...
Read MoreFebruary 4, 2009, 04:13 PM ET
RIAA Drops Lawsuits but Keeps the 'Takedown' Notices Coming
The Recording Industry Association of America announced in December that it was shifting gears and would stop suing groups of students for alleged illegal file sharing. So what is it doing now?
For starters, the industry group is pulling back from pending cases. In many lawsuits that recording companies filed against anonymous students — “John Does” — legal hurdles and universities’ challenges inhibited identification of those defendants.
“We are by and large dismissing all John Doe cases where we have not received a discovery order or a subpoena response,” Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the RIAA, said in an e-mail interview. “Of course, there are some exceptions,” she said, without naming which ones.
Music companies have already abandoned lawsuits against students at North Carolina State University, Rhode Island College, and the University of Michigan, the popular blog ...
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