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New TN Law Forces Universities To Patrol For Copyright Violations
CSMatt points with this excerpt from the EFF's page: "Last week, the RIAA celebrated the signing of a ridiculous new law in Tennessee that says: 'Each public and private institution of higher education in the state that has student residential computer networks shall: [...] [R]easonably attempt to prevent the infringement of copyrighted works over the institution's computer and network resources, if such institution receives fifty (50) or more legally valid notices of infringement as prescribed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 within the preceding year.' While the entertainment industry failed to get 'hard' requirements for universities in the Higher Education Act passed by Congress earlier this year, the RIAA succeeded in Tennessee (and is pushing in other states) with this provision that gives Big Content the ability to hold universities hostage through the use of infringement notices. Moreover, the new rules will cost Tennessee a pretty penny — in the cost review attached to the Tennessee bill, the state's Fiscal Review Committee estimates that the new obligations will initially cost the state a whopping $9.5 million for software, hardware, and personnel, with recurring annual costs of more than $1.5 million for personnel and maintenance."
How is this surprising? The recording industry is a multi-billion dollar industry in Nashville.
To be honest I can usually be a little uninformed about the RIAA and DRM and whatnot...
But come fu*king on! Why the hell would you spend millions of dollars on protection like this?? That money could sure as hell be spent elsewhere, since not only could the rest of the world use it but also even the USA themselves...
Slashdot user since
"...if such institution receives fifty (50) or more legally valid notices of infringement as prescribed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998..."
According to a recently lawsuit against the RIAA on the legality of their tactics, I would question if the notices are legally valid or not.
Hopefully this will result in universities using more open source/copyleft stuff. Someone is shooting himself in the foot here.
Stop listening to garbage music that corporate America wants you to buy. Indie music is free and you can't be sued for downloading it freely, because it's offered as a promotional gimmick to sell concert tickets. Many Indie bands advocate people sharing purchased copies of their albums, because musicians know that this freely sharing of music creates more fans. Look at Radiohead... how much did they earn on that album they released as donor-ware?
Sure you can apply all the regulations you want but you're just excluding people from your products in the long run.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Sometimes I need some detachment from slashdot to be able to keep reading. I know it's stupid and insensitive and wrong on many levels but I have to say it.
News like this give me the same feelings as horrible wars in third world countries. The more I learn the more revulsion I feel and it reaches a point where I simply detach and start thinking about something else. I transport myself to the little world around myself where those things simply don't happen.
I know about the "...now they come after me and there's nobody else left to care." parable, but still, I need a beer and a quiet mind to deal with extreme evil, or, as in this case, with extreme idiocy/corruption.
It just seems like the population doesn't get to participate in democracy anymore. Other than record companies, who could possibly think this makes sense? Or demand that such a law should be passed?
As far as music goes, I haven't heard anything worth buying in a while anyway. And I certainly wouldn't expect to hear it on the radio (they aren't giving us any other options atm). For now I'll just keep my torrents seeding and buy merch from the bands I do like, which funny enough, are mostly all from 1980 or before, so they've all got their mansions already anyhow.
Hey record labels, your biggest market (for touring bands anyway) is college students. Why do you guys want to get rid of all of that free marketing? (word of mouth, mix CD's etc.) Get a clue.
" if such institution receives fifty (50) or more legally valid notices of infringement as prescribed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 within the preceding year"
I am guessing that blanket "John Doe" notices are not really valid. Especially during the semester change-overs.
Who really knows who is using that connection?
It seems that they're more interested in protecting the music industry than supporting the education of their people.
Anyone want to predict what the outcome will be in about 20 years?
Once again, I apologize for my home state. If it's any consolation, this is just one of MANY, MANY, MANY dumbass laws passed on a yearly basis there. I decided it was time to leave about the time they started looking at creationist laws. The Scoppes Monkey Trial taught them nothing.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm the Network Admin for a large (albeit British) institution, and we have the responsibility for the content of our equipment. If it's on student equipment, it's not my problem, but I certainly won't allow a free-for-all on my network nor my servers. I'm not an idiot, I can tell when content is infringing copyright or not, and I'll deal with it.
It's not surprising that this would happen in Tennessee, one of the music industry's strongholds in the U. S.
Hopefully it won't spread to other states.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
If I were a university, I'd take this as my cue to disconnect the residential university network from the campus network and outsource the connectivity. The students would have to VPN in if they wanted access to campus services.
This would probably be cheaper than complying with this law, and even if it weren't, it would send a message to the lawmakers to be mindful of the law of unintended consequences.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Another approach to fighting RIAA and MPAA would be to create a kind of digital fingerprint process that would allow Indie bands and film makers to freely release their stuff over a closed P2P utilizing user accounts. This type of thing has been attempted in the past with great failure, but it's possible that with the proper interest, a push to exclude greedy practices from infiltrating P2P networks would be essential.
A theory of mine is that many record labels would want to release their stuff for free on P2P so that they can sue later and reap big rewards. That song used to generate $0.99 each, but after you seed it and nurture it, the windfall is $2500 for each song for each downloader.
Tell me this isn't happening!!!!!!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
This is just a hidden bail out of the music industry. They need a viable business model in the modern world.
Think Deeply.
If they aren't receiving state funds, then the state has no business putting this mandate on private institutions. Then again, this country has a long, sordid history of things like "attractive nuisance laws" like the ones which make people who have pools in their yards put up all sorts of fences to keep kids out of their yard (rather than arresting the kids for trespassing).
[R]easonably attempt to prevent the infringement of copyrighted works over the institution's computer and network resources
Well violating the students' constitutional rights seems pretty unreasonable to me, so the whole law is moot IMHO.
get f*cking up and f*cking do something about those f*ckers, protest, bring down the system, whatever, but don't sit on your lazy asses
I hate laws that essentially force others to pick up the bill for a special interest group's policing.
If the RIAA wants universities patrolled, let the RIAA pony up the money. For example, the RIAA could create some kind of contract with universities to have this done, if they really care that much. (Of course, I'd rather the RIAA just go away.)
The role of a university is education, and their budgets are limited enough. The idea that future tuition will probably be hiked to offset this kind of unnecessary expense, is even more disgusting than the idea of monitoring infringement in the first place.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
McCain won Tennessee 60%-39%.
The students could still run a website where people would advertise what content they had, and how to contact them to gain "access" to it, face-to-face. The university would be compliant, since this website, AFAICS, would not violate the DMCA itself. It might be in violation of "encouraging copyright infringement", but that's different, I think.
If the students are clever, and advertise the site as something which helps you meet other students with similar tastes in music, I think it might be hard to get any kind of ruling against it.
Ladies and gentlemen, RIAA are the mafia of the 21th century.
Yes, do you sing? You listen to recordings of other people singing and find them pleasurable. You make copies of these recordings so that you can get the same pleasure later. You actively listen to new radio and television shows in order to hear new songs to repeat this cycle. You go to bars and concerts to hear other people sing, even without hearing their recordings previously.
But you don't really sing yourself. It feels weird. You look weird doing it. Everyone looks at you weird should you do it. Everyone accepts that music and singing is what's on a disk that comes from an 'artist' and is something that you buy from a disk shop. Or download on a bit torrent. And get hassled and extorted by the RIAA who occasionally spy on your downloading. Something that they gave themselves the right to do without asking you.
This is your-our cultural input conduit. It is based on the economic concept that the best singers and song makers will physically go to a centralized city, meet with the best music instrument players, sing and play together, and the recording of this will be put on a disk. A corporation will make millions of copies, send these disk copies to all corners of the globe, sell them to people who enjoy the best singing and playing, keep most of the money for themselves and give the singers a few pennies maybe from every dollar that they collect from selling these magic music disks.
A hundred years go by and this strange economic model transcends mere commerce and becomes the primary cultural conduit for most people in the developed world.
But it is an aberration. It's only a 20th century phenomenon. It didn't exist in the hundred centuries before the 20th. And now the 20th is over. And the centralized cultural distribution model is getting better at putting you in jail, extorting your financial resources, and getting you thrown out of school than it is at meeting your basic human cultural needs.
So get a new model; get a new cultural conduit. Go back to the ways before the 20th century that people used to develop their cultural resources. Where are you going to find new music if not from recordings? From books. There is a system for writing and reading music. It works. Learn it. Where am I going to hear and share new songs? From listening to people sing them to you. And by you singing new songs to them. Sure it hurts the ears at first. Sure it feels weird and silly and uncomfortable. But these are only 20th century cultural conditionings. And the 20th century is over. Time to leave it behind.
This is the only way that we are going to stop the RIAA. By developing a parallel culture that meets our needs. And then keeping it secret from the 20th century music corporations.
Learn to sing.
So that is $9.5 million plus $1.5 million per year for Tennessee universities. Tennessee population is about 1/45th of the USA, so a similar program for the hole of the USA would be about $420 million initially plus $62 million per year to "reasonably attempt to prevent copyright infringement" at university campuses. May I say that is an awful lot of money to cover one industry. Wouldn't it be much more worthwhile to invest state money into the prevention of shoplifting, which is a real crime, and creates more damages.
At first I thought, "With the economy being what it is, I can't believe that a state would pass such an expensive statute." Then I remembered that Tennessee is the home of Nashville. So perhaps that is why the RIAA has so much pull there.
Proverbs 21:19
> I'm not an idiot, I can tell when content is infringing copyright or not, and I'll deal with it.
That's a good one! Look at the movie "Charade", for example. It was hosted for quite a while on archive.org because it was originally screened without a copyright notice. The MPAA found some loophole and got it taken down....
As an IT professional working at one of these TN universities I can report that the budget crunch currently going on in education (the aggresive growth policies that served the endowments so well in the past were mostly real estate driven) will limit the resources these new directives are allocated. In fact, we're actually considering open source solutions for the first time since I've worked here. Pretty sure the RIAA's financial well being is not at the top of our list.
Foundering first quarter revenue collections indicate that Tennessee's state budget shortfall could reach $800 million, Gov. http://www.topix.com/state/tn/2008/11/bredesen-tennessee-budget-shortfall-could-reach-800-million
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Why not nat the dorms with a waiver to get a IP that can be used network wide / forwarded ports?
Hell, we can't even afford the T in Tennessee.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
I used to do that back in the days of BBSes (using a speedy 2.4 kbit/s connection).
We posted publicly what CDs we owned, and then had "copy parties" to record tapes of each other's possessions. It was an effective method albeit time-consuming.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
If anyone has got to do it it's gotta be slashdot posters because regular anarchists don't care about information technology and the associated rights.
If they apply for some of that bailout money, (let's say a billion or two), Then they can afford to stop all internet traffic on campuses and send their students to Internet Cafe's to do their downloading. They could also hire a campus employee to go out wardriving to find all the hotspots and post them in the student rec. centers so students can download the latest Milli Vanilli hit on someone elses network :P
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
Subject says it all....
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
And again, and again, and again. Two names: William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. Most people don't sound any better than those two.
Besides, none of this avoids copyright. There's copyright on sheet music; it applies to performing that music publicly. There's copyright on lyrics, which apply to performing those lyrics publicly.
If this is with regard to a residential network provided by the universities (and not the university network as such), wouldn't the provision of this put them in the same position of an ISP, and therefore protected by the same regulations that stop ISPs getting sued for the content that goes across their network?
Stop buying music and movies. Yes that includes the ones in iTunes.
No mattr how loud you complain, if you still are giving them your money, nothing will get solved.
You have to be the change you want to see in the world - Ghandi
If a student can't read a how-to-login-to-the-VPN instruction sheet, deny him access from his dorm until he can pass remedial instruction-following 001.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
CdmrTaco Rule #327:
You are only allowed to be a racist homophobic troll if you are the first thread or within 60 seconds of the 1st thread.
FAIL
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
And with singing, comes the instruments too. (Especially the amplified instruments.)
More Gigs! More Bands! MORE NOISE !!!
Oh, the residential estates are going to hate me for this. Heehee.
You know maybe just maybe someone will see sense and the nation will get it's collective ass into gear and tell the RIAA to go spin on a sharp stick ,
It really is pathetic that in this day and age we have a people prepared to allow and put up with such a bunch of obvious cheating lying moronic thugs as the RIAA maybe if the artists were not paid so much and the managers ect were made to take a much more realistic slice of the pie we would not need such a bunch of fraudsters as the RIAA and that is all they are pure and simple FRAUDSTERS
1. Write and copyright a poem
2. Give a student a copy of poem and contract not redistribute, with penalties at 1c each if he does
3. Student distributes 50 copies, you file 50 valid DCMA notices
4. University wastes money
. . . Tennessee's stellar reputation as a leading state in higher education. Oh, wait.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
You know, the blues started in the south, too. There is a club in downtown Nashville with B.B. King's name on it, and other genres get recorded there, too.
Hell, we can't even afford the T in Tennessee.
I hear that Boson just chucked theirs into the harbour...
Next define "valid" as in valid DMCA notices. Suppose the university looks where the infringing material is supposed to be found and it isn't there. Does that make the notice invalid and you don't have to count it? And what if the notice isn't filled out properly? Or there's no proof that the notice sender is actually the copyright holder? A lot of these takedown notices have been very sloppy at best. What about counter notices? Do they decrement the count by one each time.
You know, there are penalties for filing false takedown notices. So what might happen if a university, tired of the RIAA's harassment of its I.T. staff, decided to prosecute every bad notice received? Want to bet that they might quickly find themselves off the RIAA's list (think Harvard who only threatened to prosecute) while they went after other low-hanging fruit?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If the school administrators have a backbone and are willing to stand up to the RIAA, there may be some weak spots in this law. (I haven't read the whole law, just the excerpt here.) Define "reasonably" in the sentence "[R]easonably attempt to prevent the infringement of copyrighted works over the institution's computer and network resources" and it seems to be rather vague. It seems that there are no standards are set forth as to what is reasonble. The other weak point is here: "if such institution receives fifty (50) or more legally valid notices of infringement as prescribed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 within the preceding year" What constitutes "legally valid" notices of copyright infringement? Some courts are now alleging that the RIAA can't file suit against students unless they first have proof (not just allegations) that the individual(s) did indeed infringe on copyright(s). That would mean that they don't have a "legally valid" complaint, would it not? I'm not a lawyer, but it seems that if the law is rather vague about this, it will be tested very soon in the courts.
Universities are known hotbeds for illegal file-sharing of all kinds, music, books, games.
If you want to find something for free, your local college is the place to go.
I'm not surprised about this kind of law getting passed, where else can you find so many people who are willing to engage in such behavior?
Enrollment in TN universities recently plummeted as many students became unable to pay the exponentially increasing tuition. University Administrators cited the "TN SENATE BILL NO. 3974" as the primary driver of tuition increases.
Nashville was over-run with celebration hosted by the RIAA who clashed with former-student protestors. Sadly, no RIAA employees were injured, maimed, or killed.
</queue future '09 reel>
A seemingly vague 'reasonableness' standard has been imposed upon the universities. Whoop-de-do! The most important questions are: (a) What coercive power does the Act provide? and (b) Who has the power to coerce?
There is just on thing that is bothering me in the first place...
Is it legal in the US for a Record Company to spy on users web traffic? In my country that is as bad as looking through someone's mail and you can get sentenced to jail for it.
I don't know if it is like this everywhere, but my university network will give you a unique ip, but still block all those useful ports. And even if they were open, they have this shiny new Network Operations Center to monitor traffic and block users who use P2P.
I don't think they get it. The problem is they have people taking their art and not paying for it. They want to turn those people into paying customers (at least I'd hope that's the plan).
So what is their solution? Criminal sanctions! Because nothing says grateful returning customer than a lawsuit!
Why not just offer lower cost music to students. Right now you get $0 per track, well if you could get say even $0.15 per track (or a couple bucks per album), wouldn't that be worth it? Offer say mono 96kbps mp3s, that while they're not in stereo or have the same fidelity as the original, don't sound like shit. They'd also be a lot smaller overall than the typical AAC or MP3 offered.
You're always going to have people copying things, but I think you'll catch a lot of people willing to spend $2-3 for a known good copy of an album instead of hunting around P2P searches.
Frankly though, we're talking about people who don't have a lot of disposable income. They're just not going to rush out and buy $20 albums. Get that idea out of your thick skull.
I know if I were an artist I'd rather sell a $3 album that cost next to nothing to distribute (no physical cd, case, cover, etc) than $0 because everyone just copies it via Kazaa or whatever.
11 million sounds way past a reasonable attempt, to me.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
There are also instruments that can make pleasing noises in the absence of the ability to sing. If we're going to revive the classical tradition, we may as well do it right :). Nothing says that music must have words. And fewer people look at you funny when you start out on an instrument than when you start singing.
If you know you don't have a hope in hell of actually stopping it, then just posting a 'Don't Do This' sigh is reasonable.
But you don't really sing yourself. It feels weird. You look weird doing it. Everyone looks at you weird should you do it.
Awww... Somebody failed their Rock Band group? It's OK man, you can always play the bass!
I don't understand why universities need to provide students with their own computers and network access in an era where every kid has not one but two, three, four, ten, twelve, or thirty computers (depending on how nerdy they are!). Why not just ask the students to get their own laptop and their own, personal, 3G/HSPA cellular Internet connection with an ISP of their choice? After all, every student wants to have the latest netbook with GNU/Linux, and not the Windows-based desktops or weighty laptops with locked-down net access that universities may provide. An Acer Aspire One netbook with a 3G modem and a SIM card is what students need, paid by them or their parents.
For poor students, some programme of financial support could be employed that would enable the student to buy their own netbook and 3G connection, with the laptop and connection being the student's property, so that no law and nobody could force the university to play the police officer's role.
Universities must focus on what they do best, providing education, and not throw money at IT and other projects outside their competencies that only make tuition costs higher without satisfying students. Let's keep tuition costs down and let the individual students and their families choose whether they want to spend their own money on a netbook with 3G. Let's get the universities to spend money on real scientific equipment that the students can't get easily themselves, rather than on consumer devices that are so commonplace that most students see the university's computers as too old for their needs and prefer to have their own netbook/laptop anyway (while they still pay the inflated tuition, a good portion of which is because of the cost of IT nobody uses).
Students don't want university-provided email, they want lower tuition and their own email. They don't want university-provided computers, as they already have their own (those who don't and need one can receive financial support if a suitable programme is offered by the uni, which it should be offered). Students don't want high tuition as a result of the university's IT costs while they rarely really use this IT infrastructure, they want lower tuition and their own, personal IT infrastructure, which they probably already possess anyway. There is no need for university-provided WiFi at all as well, as 3G coverage is provided everywhere anyway, at least here in Europe, and many students anyway prefer to study at home and only visit the uni for exams or handouts so for them any uni-provided IT infrastructure is not used at all.
One thing I do not understand is why private enterprise does not try to specialize in providing services to this group as a 3rd party. As an ISP vs a private network run by the university they would have to follow the same rules as any other ISP and it would free the universities from accountability. They could even bill as a separate fee to avoid lawsuits over the definition of private. As for the need for certain private network activities. It is nothing to create a few VPNs for when students need to connect for classes and some isolated sub nets for the computer systems that need such services such as registration and accounting. In fact in the vast majority of cases the new network design would be more safer and more secure than what most network jockeys fresh out of college can provide.
http://www.change.gov/page/s/contact If enough of us link to TFA and tell him how stupid it is for a government body spend money on the RIAA's behalf and how we should repeal or ammend the DMCA, they may listen to us.
Fuck Ajit Pai
The fuck? I go to UT Knoxville, and it's already suffering from budget cuts (they cut an entire department this year), so this pisses me right the hell off just for that alone. At least I'm not on their computer network any more...
"IPA Investigator"
Of course if everyone encrypted their traffic, it would make 'patrolling' a moot point.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Just wanna relate an experience I once had.
I listened to a software presenter once, many years ago. The presenter said there's no point splurging on a 28.8kbit/s modem, because in his own experience, his own 14.4kbit/s modem was just as fast.
As long as campaign donations by outsiders are legal you will see more such laws that benefit those donors than universities or you.
That is why you have multi-billion dollar bailouts, sucrose instead of sugar, and tax credits for oil companies.
Congress critters and state senators care a rat's ass about your welfare or mine or even their constituency's.
All they care about is MONEY and POWER.
As long as RIAA, Walmart and Exxon feed their egos and feed them money you will see such stupid laws coming.
Pretty soon it will be illegal to hum a song when its being played on radio.
Disconnect donations from election funding. Make it state funded and see this go away.
Unfortunately not even Obama who came roaring to power on people's $10 and $20 will be able to do this short because 99.9997% of the congress and senate is elected by these thieving corporations.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Tangential question: why do you both indent your paragraphs and put whitespace between them? Either one alone is sufficient.
...even though We-The-People are being ignored by the corporate controlled Government. We have the purse strings. Stop buying their products and those corporations will quickly fade away. We can then get back to doing things in a fair way.
Stop buying products from corporations that strong-arm OUR government... it won't take long (this includes big finance and the Fed by-the-way).
True entertainers will always perform, paid or not. With an efficient, and nearly free, distribution system the performers can make an honest living directly... as long as they are not greedy and can accept an honest living. We need to end this notion that entertainers deserve extravagant wealth. Be it in Sports, Music, Television, Movies, the Arts, etc.
The one chink in the suit of armor called capitalism is greed. The other systems have far greater holes in them. There is no sweeter taste than Freedom. If we want to be free, it must include free markets. Via collective intelligence We-The-People can control greed... we have the hammer... if we'd only use it!
For instance, I can sing: I am a band leader, I sing solos, I direct choirs...
However, I don't really have one bit of creative talent to create new material. I have given it a try--I suck. I can read music just fine, and I'm good at reproducing what that music says to do, but I haven't the faintest idea how to write it.
It's not like when I program, and I know the desired outcome and can link together the logic necessary to get from start to finish. No, music doesn't have business requirements, use cases, and you certainly don't know what the finished product is (unless you have the gift, like Mozart) until it's finished.
I think there would be more of what you advocate, but I suspect that there would be general suckage throughout society. And I think that's why we turn to the labels--there is good stuff there--even if it's just 1% of the stuff. And I know that I (and probably most others that aren't a part of the industry) don't have the creativity or talent to create something that could touch the 99% of bad stuff in the music industry. And seriously, I can sing and play multiple instruments, but that doesn't change my creative musical ability.
The state will increase it's IT staff (more geeks who will likely usurp their bandwidth doing what they are paid to stop :D ), to monitor the traffic of sororitys, frats and dorms. This really shows that neither the RIAA-MPAA nor the legislature knows what they are doing. It's kind of like letting the legislature vote on their own pay raises.
Now I realize that not ALL the IT staff will be anti-dmca but the possibilities make the mind wobble. Where do I send my resume?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Why wouldn't you think Indie when you think Radiohead? The band is signed with TBD currently, but I think that they really proved that it could be profitable using independent, free-thinking album release, which is actually part-in-parcel with being Indie -- regardless of who promotes and/or distributes you. I'm not sure who gets more credit, TBD or Radiohead for that move, but it's a big departure from the RIAA, is it not?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
When I was in college, nearly everything was accessible from the public internet because of all the off campus students. (It was all password protected and SSL encrypted, of course.) For the very few things that weren't online, you were expected to haul your butt to the lab or library.
I'm not sure that there there are many services that are both so sensitive they can't be put on the public internet and also so commonly used that it would be unreasonable to expect students to go to a lab somewhere.
I'm glad I left that corrupt shithole of a state last year!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
They only have to make a reasonable effort; but any effort beyond randomly pointing fingers around would require so much specialized knowledge and advanced, non-existent technology that it's inherently very costly, very unreliable, and for the most part an unreasonable waste of time. Therefor, there are no reasonable steps to take, so the universities don't have to do shit.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Good thing I have 10 stations programmed into my radio dial so I can skip commercials.
I have begun to hate commercials with a passion, since I stopped watching normal TV and started downloading shows. The radio ads got to me just as much after a while.
I now exclusively listen to my local listener-supported classical radio station (http://allclassical.org -- 89.9 FM in Portland, OR). They, along with many other listener-supported stations, simply read aloud written messages from some business sponsors; I find this massively less obnoxious than normal radio ads. There are apparently a few of these stations around (there was one in my home town of Tulsa), since the demand tends to be lower than is viable for a commercial classical station.
So, if you can't stand ads, don't want to pay for satellite radio, and NPR isn't your thing, there is probably something else available.
Don't blame me -- I voted for Roslin.
Furthermore, we need to get past this concept of "The best musicians are the ones that have already been identified as the best." When was the last time you went to a local show or musical event? There is great talent in every little corner of our globe. And you don't just have to find talented musicians at your local events. Do some digging online. And when you find something you like, BUY THE ALBUM. Don't just write it off because it wasn't produced by some well-known record label. We've given unsigned music this bad wrap that it somehow doesn't deserve our energy and our money, when this simply isn't the case.
If we just go and purchase what we like, regardless of where it came from and who touched it, we'll create this new system. There will be a multitude of moderately-successful artists, instead of a handful of "Artist Elite" - who essentially have just been the lucky ones who got packaged and distributed by large labels for the last 30-40 years.
Thank you, Simonetta, for an interesting and insightful approach.
I can't sing, I don't want to sing. I don't want to listen to amateurs, I want to listen to professionals. I want to listen to people who spend a lot of time practicing and training, and who are GOOD at what they do. It is called civilization, we have moved beyond the hunter gather society, and moved into a society where people can become experts at one thing. I want to go to a doctor who studied and practiced being a doctor. Not one who practices a little on the weekends, and cuts hair the rest of the time. I'm not going to stop you from listening to whomever you want. There are plenty of street musicians and amateurs you can listen to... But do you support them?
With the 1978 complete rewrite of the copyright law, and especially the Berne Convention Accession in the 1980s, it's arguable that as far as copyright is concerned, Congress has decided to completely preempt the field of copyright with respect to everything except pre-February 15, 1972 sound recordings (which aren't federally copyrighted anyway) and thus no state has authority to require or permit anything with respect to copyright (except to set rules on the copying of uncopyrightable sound recordings), and this law is in all probability unconstitutional. (The place to go to regulate copyrighted works or their use or misuse is Congress.)
This seems to be on the same level as attempts by local organizations to regulate use of WiFi, such as universities prohibiting students from running their own wireless routers, or airports trying to prohibit lessees from running their own WiFi, only to have the FCC publicly announce that neither homeowners associations, nor municipalities, nor special districts, nor state governments have any authority to regulate the use of spectrum and only the FCC has any authority to regulate what spectrum may be used and to set the terms and conditions for its use.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
***News Flash*** Spring 2009
"Reporting from the State Capitol of Tennessee, there has been a cut in federal money flowing into the State's coffers, and the reason is a surprising one. This year is the first year in the history of Higher Education that not a single application has been submitted to a single institute of higher education in the State of Tennessee. Federal matching funds for higher education have been cut."
"In a bizarre coincidence, transfers out of Tennessee Universities to Colleges and Universities in other States have seen an unprecedented increase."
I'd love to change the world but I can't find the source code.
University lowered students rights bar to jail level. What about mouse-click freedoms? Students still can create shared CDs library, or use usb devices to share if they want to share. sharing and copyright violations different things.
What a nice double entendroo you've got there, juxtaposing "bosun" and "harbor."
In other news, the RIAA has sent 50 notices of infringement to each and every university in Tennesee.
J