Wednesday, May 9, 2007

RIAA vs. Universities, Round One

I got an unsolicited email today from Mayo Communications. It's a press release titled Pirates of the Internet, Beware! Says Congress to Universities, and subtitled Congress Sends a Threatening Ultimatum and Survey to Universities With 30 Days to Respond to a Laundry List of Questions on Campus Internet Piracy ... and run as well in Sys-Con magazine (and nowhere else, far as Google can tell).

At the bottom of the release is a pointer to a blog clearly set up to shill the company that bought the publicity (but which I'll decline to support with a pointer). The company "provides an easy, immediate and cost-effective way to totally protect networks and home computers from the dangers of illegal P2P file-sharing".

What's creepiest about this is how it comes at the same time that the RIAA is getting Congress to put the heat on universities in an effort to stomp out "piracy" of copyrighted material by students. Somehow it smacks of a campaign. Given Mayo's Hollywood connections, I wouldn't be surprised.

Some universities are complying. Others are not. Here's Cory Doctorow's mark-up of a directive sent to students at the University of Southern California, where Cory teaches. The money quotes:

USC: USC prohibits any infringement of intellectual property rights by any member of the USC community. As an academic institution, USC's purpose is to promote and foster the creation and lawful use of intellectual property.

Cory: This is the single most shocking thing I have ever read from a university. The purpose of a university is to promote learning and scholarship. To say otherwise is just jaw-dropping -- if we're to take this at face value, we'd measure USC's success by the number of patents filed and copyrights registered, rather than the caliber and quality of the research and work done by our students and faculty.

Here's more from Ars Technica, including a list of the universities targetted by the RIAA and Congress.

As Cory's mark-up demonstrates, the RIAA and Congress are counting on caving by Universities such as USC, which has clearly forgotten its mission. Let's hope more universities stand up for their missions, and for their students.

By the way, I'm pleased that Harvard University, one of the schools on the RIAA/Congress hit list, is one where faculty and friends are fighting back. A sample:

One can easily understand why the RIAA wants help from universities in facilitating its enforcement actions against students who download copyrighted music without paying for it. It is easier to litigate against change than to change with it. If the RIAA saw a better way to protect its existing business, it would not be threatening our students, forcing our librarians and administrators to be copyright police, and flooding our courts with lawsuits against relatively defenseless families without lawyers or ready means to pay. We can even understand the attraction of using lawsuits to shore up an aging business model rather than engaging with disruptive technologies and the risks that new business models entail.

But mere understanding is no reason for a university to voluntarily assist the RIAA with its threatening and abusive tactics. Instead, we 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. We should be lobbying Congress for a roll back of the draconian copyright law that the copyright industry has forced upon us.

In that spirit, we'll be dealing with exactly this issue (and others no less challenging) at the University Internet & Society Conference on June 1st at Harvard. I'll be helping facilitate one or more of the working groups listed here. Registration is now open. Hope to see you there.