The editors of the Wheeling News-Register are rather disgusted by college students who download music illegally, a fact they make very clear in an unsigned editorial:To their credit, some universities are cutting off campus Internet access to culprits. Good. They should do all they can to help enforce the law — which happens to involve copyrights, much the same as those college professors have on the textbooks they write.
Of course, even many supporters of the recording industry’s antipiracy campaign would argue that the issue of campus piracy isn’t quite that clear-cut. But the News-Register editorial shows that the industry’s newest strategy — publicizing the names of colleges that have received plenty of copyright-violation complaints from record companies — is generating some good press.
Campus officials may continue to argue that they shouldn’t bear the brunt of the industry’s battle against illegal downloads, but editorials like this one could help reinforce the perception that file sharing is a problem best dealt with by colleges. Undoubtedly, most record-industry executives would like that perception to become a piece of conventional wisdom. —Brock Read
