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Lost Under the Streetlight
10/29/2004
Why Us?
Why, then, do the media industries and media reports continue to focus on college students as the culprits in the public conversation about digital piracy? Consider the Reuters report of September 30 (“Recording Industry Sues 762 for Net Music Swaps”), describing RIAA’s September 2004 lawsuits against 762 people suspected of distributing music over the Internet, including “students at 25 different colleges and universities, where the prevalence of high-speed networks and cash-poor students has led to an explosion of peer-to-peer traffic.” Yet, the RIAA’s September 30 press release, which is the basis for the Reuters report, indicates that 32 of the 762 individuals just targeted by the September 2004 lawsuit are college students.
In the broader context, the RIAA reports that just 191 of the 5,441 individuals
who have been the named targets of RIAA P2P lawsuits over the past few years
are based on college campuses, using campus networks: that’s just 3.5
percent of the RIAA “bad guys.” Still, the media industries and
the media continue to focus on college students, as opposed to Adelphia, Cox,
Comcast, Time Warner, or Verizon—the providers of consumer broadband services
that allow their customers to engage in P2P file-sharing.
So, how long before the media industries and members of Congress focus their
public comments and copyright efforts on the consumer ISPs? When will the consumer
ISPs be subjected to the same criticism, and subject to same standards, effectively
imposed on colleges and universities?
Searching Under the Streetlight
There’s no other way to say it: The continuing efforts to portray college students as the primary source of digital piracy is just wrong. Not to mention ill-informed. The P2P file-sharing activity has shifted from college networks to consumer broadband services. Unfortunately, while the terrain and technologies have shifted, it seems as if the media generals continue to fight the last war. Like the drunk, they continue to look under the streetlight for something they lost elsewhere.
Kenneth C. Green, visiting scholar at The Claremont Graduate University, is the founding director of The Campus Computing Project, a comprehensive, continuing study of the role of information technology at higher education institutions in the United States (www.campuscomputing.net).
View more articles by Kenneth Green.
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