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June 06, 2007, 12:42 PM ET
An 'All You Can Eat' Approach to Fighting Piracy
Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has looked over the questionnaire on illegal file sharing that Congress sent to 19 colleges last month. And, as he makes clear in a Washington Post opinion piece, he’s not impressed.
“One of the questions — ‘Does your institution expel violating students?’ — shows just how out-of-control the futile battle against campus downloading has become,” he writes. “Artists deserve to be fairly compensated, but are we really prepared to sue and expel every college student who has made an illegal copy?”
Most campus administrators are unwilling to do that, of course. But a growing number of colleges say they are willing to use network-monitoring and bandwidth-shaping tools to keep piracy in check, and lawmakers seem sanguine about that software.
The problem, according to Mr. von Lohmann, is that those tools don’t work: “Short of appointing a copyright hall monitor for every dorm room,” he writes, “there is no way digital copying will be meaningfully reduced.”
Mr. von Lohmann does propose a solution, though. Colleges, he writes, would probably not object to paying blanket fees to give students “all you can eat” downloading — that is, unfettered access to song and movie files that are unencumbered by digital-rights-management tools. Would the entertainment industry ever consider such a plan? That’s anyone’s guess. —Brock Read
Categories: Company-Watch, Campus-Piracy
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