Previous |
Next |
February 25, 2008, 04:02 PM ET
Chronicle Tech Forum: Campus Rights vs. Copyrights
Tampa, Fla. — Campus officials don’t want to be cops. They made that point loud and clear today in Tampa, Fla., in a panel discussion about the digital piracy of music and videos by college students. But a law professor and a representative of the movie industry told them that, in certain circumstances, colleges didn’t have much choice.
Stewart McLaurin, executive vice president for education affairs at the Motion Picture Association of America, seeks education before enforcement. College students are some of the movie industy’s best customers, he said, and his group doesn’t want to sue them. But the multibillion-dollar industry has to protect itself from theft, he went on. He would prefer to do that by educating students that getting a copy of a movie free, with no compensation to the copyright owners, is wrong.
No one disagreed. But Tracy Mitrano, director of information-technology policy at Cornell University, asked how committed the MPAA was to education. She, along with members of the audience of more than 200 people, objected to language in Congressional proposals during the past 12 months to promote the use of technology to catch copyright crooks—technology that doesn’t really work well. If education is the goal, college officials ask, why try to push an ineffective technical fix?
James Gibson, a law professor at the University of Richmond, pointed out that colleges were compelled to play cop only if they were aware of repeated instances of wrongdoing. But he had a question for those in the audience: If there was no legal pressure at all, and students were still grabbing movies and songs using a campus network, “what would you do?” —Josh Fischman
Categories: TechForum2008
Add Your Comment
Commenting is closed.