[A2k] Von Lohmann on Copyright & Universities

[Judit Rius Sanjuan]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/05/AR2007060501761.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

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

What do Columbia, Vanderbilt, Duke, Howard and UCLA have in common?
Apparently, leaders in Congress think that they aren't expelling enough
students for illegally swapping music and movies.

The House committees responsible for copyright and education wrote a
joint letter May 1 scolding the presidents of 19 major American
universities, demanding that each school respond to a six-page
questionnaire detailing steps it has taken to curtail illegal music and
movie file-sharing on campus. One of the questions -- "Does your
institution expel violating students?" -- shows just how out-of-control
the futile battle against campus downloading has become.

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.

The writer is a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier
Foundation. He represented one of the defendants in MGM v. Grokster, a
landmark case concerning peer-to-peer file sharing./

--
Judit Rius Sanjuan
Attorney
judit.rius@keionline.org

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