The University of Wisconsin is telling recording-industry executives that if they want to reach a financial settlement with students who may be illegally downloading music, they must go find them themselves. University officials have decided not to forward settlement letters to students that the Recording Industry Association of America has been mailing out.
"These settlement letters are an attempt to short-circuit the legal process to rely on universities to be their legal agent," said Brian Rust, communications manager for the university's Division of Information Technology, in an interview with The Badger Herald. The university is still enforcing its own policy regarding illegal file sharing, Mr. Rust said. And it still forwards cease-and-desist letters from the RIAA, as the university is legally bound to do. But university officials say they will not pass on letters asking students to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to avoid a lawsuit. –Dan Carnevale
4 Responses to Not My Job
Levi Montgomery - March 19, 2012 at 9:05 am
The most astounding part about the Bouchoux remark is not the assertion that “my father changed careers” is passive voice while “my father changed careers” is active voice, but the assumption that the “actor [is] identified in modifying phrase”. Since the only possible actor is “I”, are we to assume that the intent is “I changed my father’s career”?
Bizarre.
dank48 - March 19, 2012 at 10:25 am
There are too many books written by people who don’t know what they’re talking about, and not just in language. From a high-school math book used by a young person of my acquaintance: “Jon has an acre of land measuring 40,000 square feet . . .” Why would a math text be written by someone who doesn’t know an “acre” from a “parcel”? Why would someone who doesn’t know the passive from a participle write on language?
satris - March 19, 2012 at 1:55 pm
It’s a bit hard to figure out the source of the mistake in the Bouchoux sentences. Maybe it’s this: The part of the sentence that is after the comma is exactly the same in the first case and the second case, so the author’s idea of “active” and “passive” must reside in the change that was made before the comma. In the first of the two sentences we have “When a boy” — with no one in particular identified, so we’re left wondering “when WHO was a boy?” But in the second sentence we have “When I was a boy” so the boy is identified. “I” is the subject, and “was” is the predicate. It is the lack of an explicit subject (and predicate) that, in the author’s view, makes ”When a boy” supposedly passive. Supplying a subject (“I”) and a predicate (“was”) seems to turn this active. Meanwhile, “my father changed careers” has everything it needs, so it’s active throughout.
magyar - March 19, 2012 at 3:21 pm
Dear Professor Pullum
Have you considered introducing Deborah E. Bouchoux to JJ Lee (of literary competition judging fame)? He might suggest that ”had [she] found another way to construct one or two active sentences without the verb ‘to be’, she would have emerged the winner.”