February 25, 2008
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
Posted on Monday February 25, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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If MPAA is serious about educating students on copyright issues, then provide Educause and its members with funding to develop education tools. As Tracy pointed out, current wrong-headed legislative initiatives from MPAA are more about punishment, not education.
— Adrian W. Alexander Feb 25, 05:05 PM #
Schools should be happy to catch those sharing movies. It is a bandwidth hungry activity that has no place on a university’s network. It’s expensive for colleges out in the sticks and it creates congestion.
— Me Feb 26, 08:13 AM #
Actually, I want to be a cop. I wish they would issue me a shiny badge that said “Official University Administrator.” I’d like to carry a gun and a big roll of yellow tape. I’d have a black walkie talkie with lots of little buttons and knobs and I’d say, “5150 in Philosophy, 5150 in Philosophy! Tango Charlie, over.“ I’d get free donuts at the cafeteria. This is my bureaucratic fantasy.
— marci Feb 26, 02:35 PM #
The question for which I still await an answer: How many of the people who download movies, TV shows or music would actually go out and buy the products if they were not otherwise available? Any technological fix will be cracked shortly after it’s introduced. The industry will have to accept a small attrition around the edges, but I suspect that attrition is much smaller than they claim.
— Bill Feb 26, 05:14 PM #