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Opinion
Back in the Petrie Dish, but for How Long?
7/26/2007
I like Sherwin Sly’s take on this:
This is yet another egregious attempt by the content industries to draft anyone and everyone into service as copyright enforcers. The resources of colleges’ IT departments already have their hands full providing students and faculty with the necessary high-speed connections for education and research; they were never intended nor designed to be an infringement intelligence agency. And clearly, it doesn’t matter that such attempts at filtering are often fatally flawed.It parallels what some college and university presidents are now understanding about the US News & World Report rankings. Those rankings belong to the magazine, yet we got seduced into doing its work for it. Not so much anymore.
What’s the RIAA’s perspective? How about this one from Inside Higher Ed: “Colleges have provided an ideal environment for online theft to thrive, producing a generation of citizens lacking an appreciation for “the true value of” copyrighted works.” Right.
If you want to learn more about this threat, because it’s still incubating somewhere, I highly recommend the article, Protect Harvard from the RIAA, from the Harvard Crimson:
[W]hen copyright protection starts requiring the cooperation of uninvolved parties, at the cost of both financial and mission harm, those external costs outweigh its benefits. We need not condone infringement to conclude that 19th- and 20th-century copyright law is poorly suited to promote 21st-century knowledge. The old copyright-business models are inefficient ways to give artists incentives in the new digital environment.Yes, the monster is dead. The Higher Education Act was reauthorized Tuesday without the File Sharing amendment.
But its evil creator, the fussy old RIAA (who hates your cat), lurks on the dark side, determined to coercively leverage the power of others to maintain its medieval source of lucre. Keep your stakes sharpened!
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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