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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!
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...
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?
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.
IAALS.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.)