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Higher Education Committee Releases Report on P2P
djeaux writes "The Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities has released a "Background Discussion of Copyright Law and Potential Liability for Students Engaged in P2P File Sharing on University Networks." The Joint Committee includes representatives from a number of universities, education groups, entertainment industry representatives, and the presidents of RIAA & MPAA. The paper provides an overview of copyright law relating to on-campus P2P file sharing and concludes that "(c)olleges and universities generally do not have a legal duty to control students' private conduct. Students therefore should not assume that their college or university will accept liability for them or provide them with legal representation." The report was distributed to presidents of all institutions that are members of the American Council on Education on Friday, August 8."
So, in summary, people should take responsibility for their own actions. What a concept!
I can't believe it takes all of those people just to come up with one common sense solution....As if I was gonna march to the Provost's office and demand a lawyer because I'm a pirate...Geez
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
Have you been downloading pornos off of Usenet, son?
It would seem that they wrote 13 pages of well duh your not liable (the universities) under safe harbor as long as you follow DCMA procedures duh. You can give them legal help but dont have to. Otherwise it's up to the students to not infringe.
No sir I dont like it.
Well, that doesn't seem unreasonable. Although, given some of the complaining you hear ("Dear Ask Slashdot. My university network throttles Kazaa traffic. Don't they know the whole point of college is to provide faster warez downloads? Is this a violation of my civil rights?") I'm sure this will be met with outrage, too.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Me too!
Notice that a meeting of everybody involved in this other than the students have declared that the only one who possiby could be liable are the students?
This is particularly true at a state funded college or university. Why should tax-payers bear the burden to defend or indemnify students who are accused of copyright infringement?
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
It sounds like the *AA are basically trying to extend an informal common carrier status to the universities. Probably in exchange for continued future cooperation. That way the *AA avoids lawsuits from anybody with the money/clout to put up a fight (universities) and they still get to intimidate students through litigation.
Tragek
why did this story turn into spambait
Dang. Here I was thinking that some big name committee was getting all tech-saavy and releasing their latest report via a p2p network. But it's just a report about p2p. Why can't the headlines be more clear? I would hate to have to waste my time actually reading the article, after all.
Do not read this sig.
IAALS.
Vital background reading on this is Larry Solum's posts on "Copynorms", especially his analysis of the RIAA strategy.
Big old titties, floppin' around...
If this was made with both media and university interests in mind, then will universities drop any measures beyond throttling bandwidth?
You zap the moderators with a wand of humor! The moderators resist!
...As if I was gonna march to the Provost's
office and demand a lawyer because I'm a pirate...
Really? How does a pirate ask for a lawyer?
"Arrrrrrrrrrrrg! MATEY! Could ye lend me a lawyer? Or should I make ready yer fodder?
have legal services available to students. UT-Austin, for example, will represent students in civil matters for no charge.
-
They won't provide legal representation. Duh. Why would they?
I'm just wondering why they're caving constantly to the RIAA. It would be one thing if the way the RIAA worked with the legal system required the RIAA to do a little more work to prove their case before they could file subpoenas, but with the way they are allowed to send subpoenas (without initially warning with cease-and-desists) is stupid.
A club that I am a member of (25 person science fiction club) had a logo that had been designed before I joined. the problem is that the guy who designed it, who had left the club, was too similar to another logo that was copyrighted and trademarked. So, the organization who owned the original image sent us a polite letter asking us to please use up any consumables with the logo and change the logo. They didn't even get so formal as to do a cease-and-desist, a secretary from that organization sent us the letter. We politely complied.
Personally, if I was sharing data illegally and received a letter from the RIAA asking me to stop it, after some rather unpleasant bodily functions I would bring myself into compliance. Immediately. I suspsect that anyone else doing this would do the same, at least in the short-term. And if the RIAA knew who I was enough to be able to tell me to cut it out, I'd be damn sure that I kept out of trouble there on out.
By sending out legal subpoenas and filing for financial damages, they've ensured that they get no sympathy from anyone who has ever used an mp3 codec. I'd be a helluva lot more sympathetic if they were more polite initially, with letters first, cease-and-desists second, and court filings third, than my feelings right now, which are summarized as "fuck 'em".
Back to the inital point though, with colleges frequently bending to give the RIAA what they want, if the RIAA would ask the universities to deal with the filesharers who have been detected with X information on Y ip address, the colleges would probably handle it internally, the courts wouldn't have to get involved, and the offenders would stop. Much more neat and tidy.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
universities generally do not have a legal duty to control students' private conduct
Of course not - that's pretty clear. If I rob a bank, whatever institution I happened to have registered at is of course not responsible in any way.
But... Isn't a little different in that the school is also the students' ISP?
I've been thinkin' abuut droping out of colege for the past 9 ears. This really doez it, and I mean REALLY. I hereby quit school in furm protest against RAA, DMCA, and all that stuff.
*hic*
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
... that any academic council looking at P2P and "thinking" about the implications would have had the good sense to break this into two parts.
a) The issues of sharing somebody elses copyrighted material and guidelines for what to do and what not to do.
and MORE importantly...
b) The academic benefits of using P2P to share research, essays and other related material between students and the faculty. Imagine the possibilities if EVERYTHING that a university produced was available and indexed in one or more P2P applications.
Clearly, they're depressed that MIT and BC (was it BC?) defeated their subpoenas in Boston, so they're trying to convince as many universities as possible that they shouldn't spend any money fighting on behalf of their students, and just give in.
I applaud schools and ISPs that have been fighting these subpoenas. It's the right thing to do.
And they don't need a report to tell themselves that they don't need to defend their students. They're just doing what any good institution would do that cared about it's students/employees/whatever.
Copyright could be abolished tomorrow, in the US at least, if you could just get enough votes in congress to pass a bill to repeal copyright. That's not as difficult as it may sound, if you consider that more people share files with p2p apps in the US than voted for george bush.
Change the Law, a section from my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads discusses this in more detail, and suggests several specific steps you can take to reform the copyright laws and make filesharing legal:
- Speak Out
- Vote
- Write to Your Elected Representatives
- Donate Money to Political Campaigns
- Support Campaign Finance Reform
- Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Practice Civil Disobedience
Thank you for your attention.Request your free CD of my piano music.
Not only have I neither read the original article nor the summary, but I have not read the parent post. I can unequivocally say that the parent poster is wrong, however.
Mod parent up!
Since when have colleges support illegitimate activities anyways?
Since when are the Universities themselves (and/or their "umbrella groups") supposed to act as unpaid representatives of the RIAA and MPAA?!
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Uh ... what?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Allowing others to make digital copies of music, pictures, movies, books, or any other form of data for which you do not hold the copyright to is illegal.
If you had respected this from the beginning, the DMCA, et al. would have never even been conceived.
Food for thought.
Now, if the universities aren't liabe for the actions of their students, are they still obligated to provide information about the actions of said students? I don't know if the article covered that or not.
No statement is true, not even this one.
No wonder my tuition is up 7% from last year. We are paying these fools to realize that people should take responsibility for there own actions!
"Students therefore should not assume that their college or university will accept liability for them or provide them with legal representation."
Did anyone assume they would? My university already says they own all of my software projects from that time period, who would expect them to actually help me out?
There are some wonderful bits of understatement in this document:
"Although debate already rages about whether there is a digital first sale defense for the transmission of a copyrighted work when the sender's work disappears, any argument that a bona fide purchaser of a copyrighted work (such as a CD) can share P2P copies of that work with many others is not likely to be successful."
"Given recent press coverage, congressional hearings, and Internet chat, students could find it difficult to prove that they were unaware that file sharing was infringement."
"Colleges and universities generally do not have a legal duty to control students' private conduct.
Students therefore should not assume that their college or university will accept liability for them or provide them with legal representation."
And of course the footnote on the first page: "Paper prepared by Michael J. Remington, Esq., Drinker, Biddle & Reath LLP, Washington, DC, for the Education Task Force of the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities. It may be reproduced, distributed, and shared without permission for personal and noncommercial use."
Man, what a wit!
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
I didn't even KNOW there was a "Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities", but I'd sure like to see their report on Client-Server File Sharing, dated though it must be by now...
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Don't do that. How will we make the RIAA and MPAA spend all their money and go bankrupt if we get rid of these laws that make them want to sue everyone and their kitten?
Make more copyright laws like the DMCA and more encrypted P2P nets.. encourage sharing large amount of data, its even better if the data contains nothing usable but tip off any type of automated crawling system, and play the RIAA/MPAA's game until they lose. They can't sue everyone, but I wanna see them try.
I think I heard an *AA speak, maybe if everyone quiets down, I can understand them...
Now that it's quiet, and I've heard them, I can't really say that I put any value into anything that the RIAA or MPAA say, because they have absolutely no idea what the real world is like.
In the real world, people don't care what the *AA's think.
Besides, I make it a point not to put much weight to articles with titles longer than 6 words. If you can't think of a good title for something, then the content can't be all that worthy. Maybe once the *AA have hired some writers(means firing a couple lawyers), people will pay more attention.
You will be baked, and there will be cake.
Of course western justice is better, the uncivilized races simply do not have our level of sophistication.
They'd probably throw some chicken bones on the ground look for messages from the spirit world.
God damn savages, it's our burden to bring the light of civilization and justice to the backwards peoples of the world! Naturally!
Hmm, how come when I say this I get down modded. Oh well, good to see this. Remember, repeal, do not compromise. Do not ask that the time limit be 20 years. Ask that it be 0 years. By the way, do you have any links to music that accepts donations? Prefer .flac or other lossless.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
I used his iMAc to digitally erase his pecker, it didn't take long since he wasn't particularly well endowed...
The real problem is, of course, a resounding imbalance and unreasonable threats of punishment in the copyright laws themselves. It may sound like I'm preaching to the choir, but the copyright laws are pretty clearly well beyond reason. Clearly there must be some protection for copyright, but the fact is, when jailtime and a $150,000 fine are threatened for making a copy of a single song, it goes beyond threatening and becomes absurd. In contrast, I filled up my gas tank today and saw a notice warning drive-offs that if caught they will be fined the price of the gasoline, as well as up to $30 extra for the trouble they caused. That's reasonable law. $150,000 and jail time for an MP3 is just not reasonable law.
In this case, the law is in fact so unreasonable that I have little patience for those who try to enforce it to its maximum effect, such as the RIAA have been. And instead of asking "Why should the entertainment industries have such a big stick anyways," which I would hope the cream of the academic crop would ask, the colleges seem to be saying with this report, "AIIEEE!!! the entertainment companies have a big stick!"
But my point is that there's a pretty wide gap between copyright law and intuitive concepts of copyright. Its not a very evenhanded method to simply say "the laws are infallible, and the solution is to inculcate new respect for them." Instead, we should be asking where reasonable middle ground is, and the uncompromising attitude that the RIAA and the MPAA bring to every table that they force their way to is not helping solve things.
Back to the inital point though, with colleges frequently bending to give the RIAA what they want, if the RIAA would ask the universities to deal with the filesharers who have been detected with X information on Y ip address, the colleges would probably handle it internally, the courts wouldn't have to get involved, and the offenders would stop
I work for a college, and they have been doing this for the last year or so. Our network services department would get a letter about someone sharing stuff on a particular ip address. We would shut that ip down, wait for the student to call in and say that they couldn't get to the internet all of a sudden, we would check their IP against a blocked list, and if they were blocked we would have our network guys tell them what they needed to stop sharing.
My guess is that the RIAA stratagy with subpeonas is less to get particlar people to stop sharing, and more to scare people in general to stop sharing. Sort of a terristic, kill one frighten a thousand kind of thing.
I have blog like everyone else
Your web page still doesn't take a solid stance that copyright is always and was always evil. It should be removed through a consitutional amendment, even after the law has been repealed.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
It says "(c)olleges and universities generally do not have a legal duty to control students' private conduct."
So does this mean they should no longer be forced to block ports, monitor traffic, etc with anything relating to p2p activities? Sure the uni could do it if they wanted to, but wasn't there a huge big thing about the *AA's wanting unis to help them stop the p2pers. It sounds like they are no longer obligated to control which ports are open on the firewall, etc.
Sig!
This, coming from a community who wanted to shutdown Kazaa, Morpheus, etc...
So why would they want to shut down P2P networks if they (the P2P networks) couldn't practially control the users private conduct.
Why not try and shut down the colleges also?
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
However, many musicians who offer downloads also offer their CDs for sale from their website. Really the best way to support a musician whose music downloads you like is to buy a CD from them.
Keep in mind that independent musicians who pay to have their own CDs pressed get to keep most of the money when they sell a CD. Thus it is possible for them to make a decent living while selling only a modest number of CDs.
Musicians who are signed with major labels only get 42 cents when they sell a CD, and they also have to cover the costs of their advance, marketing and promotion from the initial sales of their album. Thus it may be a long time before such musicians get any money from their CD sales, and some never get any money at all.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
The report mentions TV shows as an example of something that is illegally shared on P2P networks. (pg. 3) However, it also states that courts have held that time shifting of broadcast television constitutes fair use. (pg. 1) It seems to me that, if you left commercials in the recordings (as opposed to removing them), it should be legal to download copies of shows aired on publicly accessible TV. (This would presumably not hold true for premium channels like HBO.)
And enforce the hell out of it during that time.
And at the end of that time, it becomes public domain.
So if you want the latest stuff, pay. We are trying to reward the guys that actually *do* something, not guys that sit on their arse milking work they did seven years ago. Would you hire an employee who expects to remain on the payroll because he did something seven years ago? I thought copyright was to reward the artist for creating, not reward some bozo for sitting on things so nobody else can use it. Excessive copyright time limits only encourage monopolies and extortion, not creativity.
I think a lot of this civil disobedience we are seeing today is a result of this one-sided law we are seeing passed - and a lot of people are getting pissed. They will take it for only so long before we have another Boston Tea Party.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Request your free CD of my piano music.
They should be selling CDs for cost of making/sending if they want. The idea behind gifts is to let the buyer set the price. Unusual, but it makes sense with a non-scarce resource. One person with means will donate enough to cover those who donate less. The better you like it, the more you give.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
It is worth noting, however, that these institutions may face claims of contributory or vicarious liability from the conduct of their students.
Not that any student downloading loads of free music would care, but their schools could still be blamed and/or sued for liability. I wouldn't be surprised, given how desparate the music industry is nowadays...
Merriam-Webster tells us that liable means 'obligated according to law or equity'.
If a copyright violation occurs, someone is to blame. Someone is liable. Someone is ultimately accountable.
I frankly don't care what you think about copyright law itself when you say something like this...the idea that anyone but a student is liable when he downloads something in an illegal manner is repugnant.
Is the university making him liable? Bullshit. This will force draconian 'speech and content' regulations coming from a college's board with respect to networks. If they're liable, they'll do everything they have to to make the copyright violations stop, up to and including pulling network plugs.
Is the ISP connecting the university to the world making the student liable? Bullshit. Remember the DMCA? The DMCA is an example of a law passed or proposed whose purpose is to spread liability around - so - because it's hard to find individual users doing something, that an ISP must comply with subpoenas to provide information (and if they don't, they ARE liable for copyright infringment).
Who do you think you are? Anyone but a student being liable for the copyright infringement he himself does only invites even more onerous law to be passed to cover the asses of those who are MADE liable because those committing a civil crime can't deal with that fact.
Change the law. But for Christ sakes, put the blame where it belongs.
You make me sick.
Are underage students who are living on a high school campus doing P2P responsible for their own actions or does that responsibility / liability fall to the school?
Parent: It's a concept the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon knew. The Greeks and Romans new it. The Saxons and Normans knew it. Even the founders of the US knew it. But somehow that concept has been lost in the modern US. It's truly sad.
I just wish I knew exactly where to place the blame.
Too funny!
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
I don't really know, but I would imaging that this would cause the schools to be liable for their students' copyright infringement.
This wouldn't apply to Universities to the extent that their students are adults, but it is common for people to attend Universities as minors if they ever got put ahead during grade school.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
"(c)olleges and universities generally do not have a legal duty to control students' private conduct. Students therefore should not assume that their college or university will accept liability for them or provide them with legal representation"
Why this outcome? If schools don't have to control students private conduct, it means students that schools can't control what they share, what p2p networks they connect.
Are **AA's appeals asking for student data worthless? Assumed that a school doesn't have control over my actions, they don't have to provide any information to them if they ask for it.
Am I wrong?
They've declared war on the entire high tech community, whether we share files or not. Fuck 'em... or more to the point, let's fuck them up.
If you must have your Britney fix, buy from used record stores.
However, to make the point that the RIAA label declining sales is due to their own behavior and the crap they are putting out, better buy from independent artists. That's one place to find some, check my sig for another.
If it isn't played on FM and not available in record stores, it's probably from non-RIAA label sources, to make sure, check any artist you're thinking of buying at RIAA Radar.
If RIAA label sales drop by 5% and indie label and musician sales double, it's all over for the labels... the excuses about PIRACY!!! will no longer play with. . . the people in the multinationals major label CEOs report to.
If being on a RIAA label is shown to be a negative as far as making money goes... the rush for the exits will start and the RIAA won't be able to afford lobbyist teams anymore.
Leaving the MPAA out there all by itself, given that the RIAA won't be around to play bad cop anymore. That's the next war.
Tech Public Policy stuff
First off, the paper wrote: ... the exclusive Right to their respective Writings ...." Art. 1, section 8, clause 8. (pg 5) [Emphasis mine]
The U.S. Constitution authorizes Congress to enact copyright laws "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors
Then it says:
"Nonetheless, based on the facts known about most of the systemic and extensive P2P file sharing by students in order to avoid purchases, including the copying of entire works and the widespread making available of those works, and the possibility of a showing of adverse market effects, a successful fair use defense is not likely. Such file sharing involves essentially exact copying of entire creative works, typically in ways that do not add to the store of knowledge or the creation of new works. Although there is some conflicting evidence, courts that have considered the issue have accepted the recording industry's evidence and arguments that file sharing is damaging the market for copyrighted works." (pg 6) [Emphasis mine]
I think i've found the silver bullet, for lack of a better term. "Filesharing involes...[uses] that do not add to the store of knowledge or the creation of new works." And Copyright is setup to "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
If the RIAA and all claim that what is being distributed does not add to the store of knowledge nor creation of new works, then I will claim the works are therefore not useful art.
Copyright is not setup to protect unuseful art, only useful, so they cannot claim protection under copyright.
If however, their works do add to the knowledge and creation of works and the filesharers are not making money off of this, then it is for educational use and falls under "fair use".
Fair use exceptiosn allow copying of copyrighted works not owned that is conversing infringing if no money is exchanged..
For eample I cannot copy a book on xerox at library because I put money in the xerox machine..hoever I can do it at home if I have axerox machine..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Easy there. A Biblical number would be seven days, not seven years.
Less is more !
Ok this is a issue in the Higher ED space, and others I am aware of. So waht is best practice to prevent these kind of lawsuits? I know stop P2P, but how firewalls cant stop traffic fraom all the ports these users are downloading from. The end users are smart, they know to change the cliet to port 80, which everyone lets port 80 out. SHOW ME THE LAYER 7 FIREWALL........ staz
Despite the fact that these decisions state that universities won't be held accountable for student's actions, I see no reason for them to completely stop making the effort.
First of all, there is a lot of fine software out there that can filter out commonly used P2P ports on a network. The general music sharing community is unaware of methods to circumvent these network filters, and so that could make a large dent in the amount of online file sharing without a lot of specific work. This would not only be a help to the music industry, but could save the colleges a good deal of money on bandwidth.
I'm not sure about other carriers, but I know that my university pays quite a bit for outgoing web traffic. Taking some fairly simple measures could help save a bundle on internet connections.
A small effort from everyone involved could have large payoffs for a lot of people.
~Mike
Mike Rizzo
(c)olleges and universities generally do not have a legal duty to control students' private conduct
Yeah, but the funny thing is that at my college if you were to get into any trouble outside of the college, you would be punished for it by not only the local authorities, but also by the laughable student disciplinary committee. They can get away with it because it doesn't amount to a court so much as it does an internal review board, but it seems to me that a college will do everything in its power to control the private conduct of its students.
I don't think its fair to say a university should be acountable for the conduct of its students in these matters, but they can take some precautions (like blocking incoming ports used by p2p clients) to minimize this risk, and they can certainly take a stand in making sure that when the RIAA/MPAA come knocking and demanding student's names that the *AA has at least followed proper legal procedures (vis a vi this out of state subpoena crap), and finally, if the university does want to take such a hands off aproach, pretending that the student is still going to be able to afford to attend, they should damn well not hand down any additional punishments from atop their ivory tower.
Last I checked, more people are currently doing what you consider such a heinous crime than voted for the current President of the USA. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
And for the record, it is 100% legal for me to loan my CD collection to a buddy so that he can copy it. It is also 100% legal for me to loan a book out to someone if they want to photocopy a few pages from it. Ah, living in Canada has its advantages.
Lastly, the only reason *digital* copies would be any more illegal than analog copies is BECAUSE of the DMCA. Not the other way around, like you imply.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
"Students therefore should not assume that their college or university will accept liability for them or provide them with legal representation."
When I was in college. We had the opportunity to pay a small fee for pre-paid lawyer services; good for wills, consultation, a limited amount of in court appearance, etc.
"The act of distributing, is copyright infringement."
Yes. Exactly.
Why don't people get it? DOWNLOADING is not what any of this is about. Its uploading = sharing = distributing that is the illegal part that is being targeted. Download, copy, possesstion ARE NOT BEING PROSECUTED. The proof is 10 times harder; and its just not necessary cause if noone uploads illegally, there is no copywritten data to download.
P2P in itself is legal. the sharing of copyrighted files is wrong. I only share non copyrighted files. using the edonkey ed2k function i share MY notes which IS legal and share songs where as far as i know it is legal to share, from independant artists on mp3.com and similar sites. I posted the links on my webpage http://p19m.bravepages.com with ed2k links. Like this i save $ by not requiring hosting, and using P2P which is a good method for transferring files. P2P in itself is not illegal. It's how you use it that counts. If someone can create a site like sharelive or sharereactor for legal files, i would add my links pver there surely.
*AA isn't doing this. [RI|MP]AA is. The difference? Well, the American and Canadian Automobile Associations, Alcoholics Anonymous, and other *AA's probably don't have anything to do with it...
Help us build a better map!
For a moment there, I thought that the Higher Education Committee had released a report using P2P. Now that would have been cool. What a way to show that P2P has legal uses!
There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind. (Francis Bacon)
Someone with the cranial capacity of Piltdown Man posts a comment that resembles encrypted Swahili or transmission-line noise more than intelligent discourse and I get modded down for expressing legitimate confusion. Fine.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.