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August 16, 2007, 04:00 PM ET
A Fight That Feels Futile
As The Boston Globe reports, several local colleges are preparing for the fall by stepping up their efforts to prevent illegal music and movie downloading. But officials at those institutions don’t seem terribly optimistic that their next wave of antipiracy programs will actually work.
“I thought we were pretty strenuous before, but it hasn’t worked,” said John Dubach, chief information officer at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which placed high on a recent list of colleges that had received the most copyright complaints from the recording industry. The university has urged students to use Ruckus, a free download service, and campus officials are putting antipiracy posters in residence halls.
But so far, nothing has worked. “This whole system has got to change somehow,” Mr. Dubach told The Globe.
Nearby Brandeis is trying a different tactic: The institution is hosting a series of “digital self-defense” seminars for students, with the pragmatic title “Don’t Get Sued.” But Perry Hanson, Brandeis’s vice president and vice provost for libraries and information technology, described a “total disconnect” between what campus officials have said about piracy and what students have seemed to believe. Is there any type of antipiracy education program that colleges can actually feel sanguine about? —Brock Read
Categories: Campus-Piracy, Student-Life
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