Harvard Law Professor Urges University to Fight RIAA

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Distinguished Harvard University Law School Professor Charles Nesson has called upon Harvard University to fight back against the RIAA and stand up for its students, writing 'Seeking to outsource its enforcement costs, the RIAA asks universities to point fingers at their students, to filter their Internet access, and to pass along notices of claimed copyright infringement. But these responses distort the University's educational mission. ...[W]e should be assisting our students both by explaining the law and by resisting the subpoenas that the RIAA serves upon us. We should be deploying our clinical legal student training programs to defend our targeted students.'"

Comments

His daugther works on a PhD in CS at Harvard

[null-und-eins]

Nesson's daughter Rebecca (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~nesson/) works on a PhD in CS after going to Law School. Hence, you can be sure that he is very well aware of the discussion inside the CS community. Rebecca won Google's Anita Borg Fellowship 2007 (http://www.google.com/anitaborg/) and I remember here as a very nice person all around.

Copyright Law

[deAtog]

With all the talk about this recently, I'm surprised someone hasn't mentioned this sooner... Granted I'm not a lawyer, but last I read, copyright law explicitly states that it is perfectly legal for students attending an educational institution to make a copy of any copyrighted work for educational purposes. Who's to say the students in question weren't doing so for this exact purpose?