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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.
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.
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.
Really.... "reasonably attempt" and only if there are fifty or more "legally valid" notices...
The kind of legislation made by lawyers to increase the amount of time they get to charge customers for litigation.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Oh please. If the mafia came after you for file sharing, you would be begging for lawyers and political hijinks.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
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.