Massive Increase in RIAA Copyright Notices

According to Wired, universities in the US are experiencing a "20-fold increase" in the number of takedown notices from the RIAA in the last ten days. Indiana University reports 80 notices a day, but they say their traffic hasn't increased significantly over the same time period. It will be interesting to see if the affected schools join the legal battle against the RIAA, or cave under the increased pressure. "University of California at Berkeley's chief information officer Shel Waggener confirmed he'd heard of the spikes and suggested there was a political purpose driving them. 'Public universities are in a unique position since the industry puts pressure on us through state legislatures to try to impose what are widely considered to be draconian content monitoring measures and turn us into tech police forces in support of a specific industry,' Waggener said. The RIAA is also backing legislation in states such as Illinois and Tennessee that would require schools that get a certain number of notices to begin installing deep packet monitoring equipment on their internet and intranets, according to Luker."

Comments

Re:Universities To Do What??

[HadouKen24]

1. I get a huge kick out of this Shel person quote. Since when is plain-speaking rewarded or even sanctioned in big-school politics? Shel must be planning to move onto a much smaller school.
Levity aside, he is at Berkeley. Their views on what is and isn't respectable are rather different than the mainstream. I mean, the town (and hence, University) was named after a guy who rejected the idea that anything actually physical exists.

A statement from someone like that at Berkeley gives me hope that they'll rethink they're tolerance for and cooperation with the RIAA's antics. It wouldn't be difficult for them. Heck, they could assign law students to dealing with the issue and probably do quite well; Berkeley has one of the top ten law schools in the country, by many rankings.