May 10, 2007
A Copyright Call to Arms
When the recording industry comes calling, with lawsuits in hand, most colleges make a point to protect their own status as disinterested third parties: They’ll respond to legally binding “John Doe” subpoenas and, in many cases, pass pre-litigation notices along to students suspected of song swapping. But they won’t name students unless legally compelled to do so, and they’ll usually try to avoid any unnecessary monitoring of campus networks.
Colleges that walk that tightrope may be protecting their own legal interests, but they’re not serving students’ needs, argue two professors at Harvard University. Wendy M. Seltzer, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Charles R. Nesson, co-director of the center, write in The Harvard Crimson that the recording industry’s campaign of sending out pre-litigation notices and its endorsement of Internet-filtering software “distort the University’s educational mission:”
[W]e should be assisting our students both by explaining the law and by resisting the subpoenas that the RIAA serves upon us. We should be deploying our clinical legal student training programs to defend our targeted students. We should be lobbying Congress for a roll back of the draconian copyright law that the copyright industry has forced upon us. Intellectual property can be efficient when its boundaries are relatively self-evident.
Few (if any) colleges have been willing to play such an activist role in the file-sharing wars. But if federal lawmakers continue to step up their campaign against campus piracy, college officials may have no choice but to stake out more aggressive stances on copyright. —Brock Read
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There is no copyright industry, Professor. As you know, copyright is protected in the very first Article of the U.S. Constitution and updated as overseen by the Congress. If there’s any “forcing” taking place, it’s being done by the force of law which you can certainly try to change.
Authors, other creators and publishers are merely attempting to operate under the rights granted to them by law. That permits you, of course, to muster a defense. Name-calling, however, is unseemly.
— Rob May 11, 07:26 AM #
“Authors, other creators and publishers are merely attempting to operate under the rights granted to them by law.”
Some of them, but there are some powerful groups out there who are rewriting the copyright laws to their benefit.
— Phillip May 11, 08:25 AM #
The laws clearly aren’t working, and pit large corporations against individuals, especially youth. As Ms. Selzer and Mr. Nesson point out, boundaries that are “relatively self-evident” are much easier to enforce and would alleviate the witch-hunt and “make examples of” enforcement of the RIAA.
— Richard May 11, 11:09 AM #
A working group on RIAA and University efforts will led by Wendy Seltzer at the Internet & Society Conference 2007 on the Harvard Law Campus on June 1. Information about the conference can be found at: http://www.is2k7.org/.
— Becca May 11, 01:23 PM #
The abstract language of “rights” here is not helpful, in my opinion. Historical context is, however.
The RIAA is the enforcement arm of a bloated, incredibly-wasteful monopolistic industry—an industry that accumulated tremendous wealth in the first place by exploiting little-known artists on one end while gouging consumers on the other. Attempting to portray the RIAA as “protecting copyright” is a bit like saying the East India Company was trading in tea. (i.e. a fact that, while technically true, is hardly the most salient point.)
In the larger view, music-swapping is merely a long-gestating response to a corrupt monopolistic system—a digital jacquerie against an audio Ancien Regime if you will.
(Would there actually be a “piracy” problem if CD prices were more in line with production costs + artist royalties…around $1 per CD… I ask rhetorically?)
I can immediately see why the RIAA would want to employ the universities as footmen in their ongoing fight to prop up their Byzantine monopolies, prerogatives, and privileges. But I fail to understand why any university would even consider taking on such a role.
This is not our fight. But if we must make it so, let us at least fight on the side of the weak.
— David May 11, 03:10 PM #
David may consider the RIAA and the music industry it represents as corrupt and worth destroying, but it would be interesting to know what he would put in its place. He also might like to know that the same P2P networks that are used to share music illegally are also used to share much other copyrighted material, including works written by professors who need to publish to get tenure—yes, even at Harvard!
— Sandy Thatcher May 11, 05:21 PM #
Instead of creatively developing a new way to market their products the RIAA is wasting everyone’s time, money and energy trying to protect an antiquated system. In true “All-American” form the only people benefitting from all this BS are lawyers, maybe even some Harvard graduates? The whole situation is so sad, what a waste!
— frankie May 14, 11:26 AM #
Nothing is forced upon anyone. Much of this talk is absolutely irrelevant. Intellectual property is just that – property. It belongs to the artist. It belongs to the author. If you don’t want to pay what is asked, then don’t pay. . . but don’t then steal someone’s property.
This is really very simple. Don’t steal. Don’t take (or share) what doesn’t belong to you. All the arguments about P2P or the RIAA or whatever are simply supposedly “good” people trying to rationalize away the fact that they are behaving like common, petty theives.
— Bill May 15, 10:40 AM #
Copyright infringement is not theft. They’re distinct both in the eyes of the law and reality. Directly equating the two is intellectually lazy, dishonest, and dangerous.
— Kevin Guidry May 15, 12:53 PM #