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May 10, 2007, 03:42 PM ET
A Copyright Call to Arms
When the recording industry comes calling, with lawsuits in hand, most colleges make a point to protect their own status as disinterested third parties: They’ll respond to legally binding “John Doe” subpoenas and, in many cases, pass pre-litigation notices along to students suspected of song swapping. But they won’t name students unless legally compelled to do so, and they’ll usually try to avoid any unnecessary monitoring of campus networks.
Colleges that walk that tightrope may be protecting their own legal interests, but they’re not serving students’ needs, argue two professors at Harvard University. Wendy M. Seltzer, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Charles R. Nesson, co-director of the center, write in The Harvard Crimson that the recording industry’s campaign of sending out pre-litigation notices and its endorsement of Internet-filtering software “distort the University’s educational mission:”[W]e should be assisting our students both by explaining the law and by resisting the subpoenas that the RIAA serves upon us. We should be deploying our clinical legal student training programs to defend our targeted students. We should be lobbying Congress for a roll back of the draconian copyright law that the copyright industry has forced upon us. Intellectual property can be efficient when its boundaries are relatively self-evident.
Few (if any) colleges have been willing to play such an activist role in the file-sharing wars. But if federal lawmakers continue to step up their campaign against campus piracy, college officials may have no choice but to stake out more aggressive stances on copyright. —Brock Read
Categories: Campus-Piracy, Legal-Troubles
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