[CAnet - news] Copyright Silliness on Campus

For more information on this item please visit my blog at 
http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
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[Some excerpts from Washington Post article posted on Dave Farber's IPer
list-- BSA]

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/05/ 
AR2007060501761.html>

Copyright Silliness on Campus
By Fred von Lohmann
Wednesday, June 6, 2007; A23


As universities are pressured to punish students and install  
expensive "filtering" technologies to monitor their computer  
networks, the entertainment industry has ramped up its student  
shakedown campaign. The Recording Industry Association of America has  
targeted more than 1,600 individual students in the past four months,  
demanding that each pay $3,000 for file-sharing transgressions or  
face a federal lawsuit. In total, the music and movie industries have  
brought more than 20,000 federal lawsuits against individual  
Americans in the past three years.

History is sure to judge harshly everyone responsible for this absurd  
state of affairs. Our universities have far better things to spend  
money on than bullying students. Artists deserve to be fairly  
compensated, but are we really prepared to sue and expel every  
college student who has made an illegal copy? No one who takes  
privacy and civil liberties seriously can believe that the  
installation of surveillance technologies on university computer  
networks is a sensible solution.

It's not an effective solution, either. Short of appointing a  
copyright hall monitor for every dorm room, there is no way digital  
copying will be meaningfully reduced. Technical efforts to block file- 
sharing will be met with clever countermeasures from sharp computer  
science majors. Even if students were completely cut off from the  
Internet, they would continue to copy CDs, swap hard drives and pool  
their laptops.

Already, a hard drive capable of storing more than 80,000 songs can  
be had for $100. Blank DVDs, each capable of holding more than a  
first-generation iPod, now sell for a quarter apiece. Students are  
going to copy what they want, when they want, from whom they want.

So universities can't stop file-sharing. But they can still help  
artists get paid for it. How? By putting some cash on the bar.

Universities already pay blanket fees so that student a cappella  
groups can perform on campus, and they also pay for cable TV  
subscriptions and site licenses for software. By the same token, they  
could collect a reasonable amount from their students for "all you  
can eat" downloading.

The recording industry is already willing to offer unlimited  
downloads with subscription plans for $10 to $15 per month through  
services such as Napster and Rhapsody. But these services have been a  
failure on campuses, for a number of reasons, including these: They  
don't work with the iPod, they cause downloaded music to "expire"  
after students leave the school, and they don't include all the music  
students want.

The only solution is a blanket license that permits students to get  
unrestricted music and movies from sources of their choosing.

At its heart, this is a fight about money, not about morality. We  
should have the universities collect the cash, pay it to the  
entertainment industry and let the students do what they are going to  
do anyway. In exchange, the entertainment industry should call off  
the lawyers and lobbyists, leaving our nation's universities to focus  
on the real challenges facing America's next generation of leaders.


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