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NC State Stands Up to RIAA
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Technician Online at North Carolina State University reports that its Director of Student Legal Services, Pam Gerace, has advised students to remain anonymous, and has indicated her office's willingness to challenge the RIAA's subpoenas. What's more, the newspaper urges students to take Ms. Gerace up on her offer. The fighting spirit of Jimmy Valvano lives on."
I love NC State's policy toward the RIAA's stalin like tactics. While they do punish students on their own accord the entire legal department is against the RIAA's method of approaching students. I am very proud to work for a university that values copyrights while at the same time education it's students about their rights and current law.
On top of that then steps up and practices what it preaches.
Unfortunately, if the university's adminsitration isn't behind her (and they might well be, viz acedemic freedom), she could get reversed and reprimanded. Worse since the Regents ulimately report to the NC Legislature. Still, acedemics _can_ be cantankerous. And are expected to be or tenure would not be granted.
NCSU has a chancellor that writes open letters to the students telling them to "respect the DMCA" and NCSU's stance on student's intellectual property is to take it away from them and claim it belongs to the university. This one instance does not make NCSU grand or great and I will not applaud them until they do the right thing elsewhere within the University as well. Before anyone responds with "That's how it is in real life" or some other bullshit answer I encourage you to go look around at both employers and other universities practices in regards to employee/student developed IP. Most universities have started giving that IP to the students and do not keep it for themselves as NCSU does.
I'm pretty sure you're absolutely full of shit. Most Universities (and all that I've been a part of), and pretty much every company on the planet require grad students/employees to sign over rights to what you create. If you're talking undergrad - where you pay the university - that might be different, but unlikely even then if you developed that IP with university property. For grad work, where the university pays you, the university keeps the rights. Sometimes there's a royalty sharing agreement, but you don't get to negotiate it.
As for companies, if you find one that lets you keep IP that you create as an employee, stay there. I've never seen such a company.
DVRs/VCRs are illegal because you are copying data from somewhere onto media?
At first I thought downloading would cut and dry be against copyright law, but now I'm not so sure. I don't think the obligation to determine if the source is a legitimate distribution system should fall upon the user. By 'common sense', currently most P2P networks today with obviously copyrighted materials is a legally questionably thing to do (since you are definitely becoming the source), but what happens when a source with an air of legitimacy starts up a P2P based service that turns out to be illegal? Should users be penalized just because they were frauded and allowed their upstream bandwidth to be use by the company to commit copyright violation without their knowledge?
From a legal perspective, I'm actually finding myself thinking the only sane entity to chase would be the one who initially injects the content into the P2P network (i.e., the person who posts a torrent to a tracker). The second logical place would be the tracker itself if they have a demonstrated history of ignoring copyright notices, but the users, it's hard to say. Forget the technicality of whether the protocol borrows some of their upload, their action isn't really as different from using a DVR as one might think.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You had better also read the agreement carefully. When DirectTV was pulling this stunt, they were including a blurb where you admitted to having committed copyright violation. Given that there are now criminal penalties on the books for copyright violation, you could very well be paying $3000 for a nice vacation to 'pound you in the ass prison'.