Ugh, the bill with the horrid p2p provisions passed the house without a word about those provisions.
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I’m disgusted.
Update: Didn’t pass the house–just the committee. But the vote was unanimous. Sigh.
Democrats have included in the latest higher education bill a provision to punish colleges and universities who do not “develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.” Congress has been trying to get something like this through for quite a while. I wrote about this back in March. I don’t know what’s sadder–that Democrats are the ones pushing for this or that they’re sneaking it into a bill that hopes to lower college costs. Requiring colleges to purchase expensive subscription services or implement a technical solution is not going to help lower costs. Many colleges already have trouble keeping technologically current and many of the solutions require certain levels of infrastructure to be in place. I know a few colleges and universities are fighting the RIAA, but most are complying with requests that come in. I’m disappointed that our congresspeople would be so obvious about where their loyalties lie. I’m off to write letters.
This week’s Tech Therapy (yes, I listen) is an interview with Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA. About halfway through, Scott Carlson asks a question I sent in (I’m identified by name and school) about whether colleges and universities are doing enough to meet the DMCA requirements. He couches his answer by saying that some are doing a good job and some are not. He focuses on education as something that colleges should be doing more of since they are, after all, institutions of learning. He sees it as the colleges job to educate students about illegal downloading, something he actually raises in the question before. He discusses the way colleges crack down on plagiarism but now downloading. He says colleges should teach values and ethics. And I have to disagree a bit. Sure, most colleges try to instill ethics and values, but that’s not our main job. We teach disciplines. I know our student affairs office tries to deal with some of these issues, but really we’re not their parents. There’s only so much we can do. And I think we probably do a better job than larger institutions. I do think we could probably do more to educate students about this issue, but I have another job to focus on, so it’s not going to be my top priority. And I don’t think it should be–just as it shouldn’t be my top priority to educate students about drinking or safe sex.
Meanwhile, some institutions are fighting the RIAA’s tactics in court. And others are complaining that content owners, like the RIAA, have too much control over current copyright law and fair use is disappearing. I think that the battle between colleges and the RIAA is indirectly about fair use. The RIAA and other content owners continue to try to lobby lawmakers to extend copyright restrictions and make using materials illegal even in educational settings. They don’t seem willing to compromise on this issue and so colleges and universities don’t feel like doing any more than the bare minimum to follow through on RIAA requests to sue their students.
Meanwhile, some institutions are fighting the RIAA’s tactics in court. And others are complaining that content owners, like the RIAA, have too much control over current copyright law and fair use is disappearing. I think that the battle between colleges and the RIAA is indirectly about fair use. The RIAA and other content owners continue to try to lobby lawmakers to extend copyright restrictions and make using materials illegal even in educational settings. They don’t seem willing to compromise on this issue and so colleges and universities don’t feel like doing any more than the bare minimum to follow through on RIAA requests to sue their students.
Imagine if copy machines had a way of detecting whether you were copying something you printed out yourself or a book or journal article and wouldn’t make copies if it were one of the latter. That’s what many DVD/VHS players do. Yesterday, as I was setting up my brand new, beautiful mini-dv/DVD decks and attaching them to my brand new, beautiful Mac Pros, I tested one machine only to discover that there was no signal traveling through the firewire cable. I could watch the movie fine on the attached tv, but not through iMovie. I was foiled by engineering and the faculty and students who use the lab to make video clips for presentations won’t be able to.
Last January, the Library of Congress agreed to allow for the circumvention of copy protection to make video clips for educational use. What we do in the lab is perfectly legal. To my knowledge, no one comes in and makes a copy of an entire DVD. It would take too long using the play it out method we use to take small snippets. And besides, there are plenty of freely available DVD ripping programs out there if one is so inclined. Let me just say that no pirate in their right mind is going to use a DVD player/computer setup to make massive copies of DVDs when there are programs and devices that will do it much faster and efficiently. All this engineering does is prevent regular people from doing fully legal things with content.
If we wanted to get serious about engineering the law into our machinery, we’d engineer cars to only go the speed limit or to not start if it detects alcohol at a certain level. Both of those activities can and do lead to injury and fatalities, but we don’t engineer cars that way because it infringes on the rights of drivers. Whose rights are we protecting by engineering copy protection into our players and computers? Not regular citizens’. We’re protecting the movie industry’s and the recording industry’s. I’m all for pursuing people who steal content, just as I’m all for cracking down on speeders and drunk drivers. But preventing me from working with that content legally just doesn’t make sense.
There is a chance that the DMCA and Fair Use and other copyright issues will once again be considered in Congress as the content makers pressure Congress to tighten laws. The latest of these H.R. 1201 (FAIR USE act) is in subcommittee now, but may make it to the floor once again. If you want to be able to use multimedia materials the same way you use text in your teaching and research, you’ll pay attention and lobby your congressmen to vote on the side of education, not business.
Remember what I said yesterday about content owners making it harder for people like me to circumvent copy protections and DRM in order to legally copy something for fair use purposes? Okay maybe you didn’t get that far. For those who don’t know, the new blu-ray and hd-dvd’s have stronger copy protection. The minute they came out, however, hackers cracked the protection scheme and have posted instructions all over the internet. A couple of weeks ago, Google received a takedown notice for the key that allows someone to copy hd-dvds. The key itself is contained in the takedown notice so now the whole internet has this key. This morning as I was perusing my feeds, which include a collection of technorati tags such as “dmca” and “copyright,” I noticed this key is everywhere. A search on technorati reveals probably hundreds of blogs posting this key. Can they issue takedown notices for all of them? Is it really worth it? Maybe they should give up? I find the whole thing amusing.
Update: There’s now a t-shirt.
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I hate current copyright law. I’m not a lawyer and I haven’t gone over all of it with a fine-toothed comb, but much of it is dumb and preventing most of us regular people from engaging in activities that are educational, entertaining, and enlightening. What else is there to live for?
Many of you know that I’m our DMCA agent. I know that downloading and sharing copyrighted material is illegal. I don’t condone it. But I also know that the music industry brought some of that on itself by not coming up with a viable business model for online music sales, by using DRM, and by not selling a good portion of its catalog most of the time. And the RIAA, the MPAA, and other organizations tend to treat their customers like criminals, mostly in the tactics they use to attempt to keep people from illegally downloading music. And those tactics don’t really stop the downloading, and they are sometimes wrong. A recent Economist article points this out:
Belatedly, music executives have come to realise that DRM simply doesn’t work. It is supposed to stop unauthorised copying, but no copy-protection system has yet been devised that cannot be easily defeated. All it does is make life difficult for paying customers, while having little or no effect on clandestine copying plants that churn out pirate copies.
I don’t like the way the RIAA is basically making colleges (and ISPs generally) do their work for them. It’s akin to the FBI calling up a neighbor, telling them they think I have a stolen item in my house and would they go check please and have me return it. But this is the deal struck in the DMCA so that colleges and ISPs wouldn’t get sued. Myself and another staff person spend a couple of hours or so each week investigating claims, writing notes to students, following up with students, shutting off their internet access and then restoring that access when they comply.
But the RIAA isn’t the only organization that’s copyright happy. Other publishers have been overstepping their bounds as well. If you don’t follow the science blog beat, there was a pretty big scuffle over fair use of some figures by science blogger Shelley Batts, which I found via Janet and which made the rounds of the big blogs and landed in Scientific American. Here is the fair use clause:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
The copyright office recommends always getting permission because the fair use guidelines are not clear. Lovely, huh? We have unclear laws, so we’re going to put the burden on you all, especially academics, to make sure you’re not violating the law while doing work that benefits society as a whole. As more and more academic work goes online, publicly, this is going to be a huge issue, simply because that work will be more visible and may then be open to more cease and desist notices. Something that is in the public good may get restricted because of poorly worded and poorly understood copyright laws. I recommend a visit to the EFF to support changes to the DMCA that will help fair use.
Another way in which our copyright and royalty structures hamper us is in the reproduction in new formats of movies and tv shows. Anyone remember the Eyes on the Prize dilemma? Here is a rundown. Basically, the production company couldn’t afford to renew licenses for news footage and especially music that had been used to create the film and so they couldn’t show it again on tv or reproduce it in DVD format. Although the Eyes on the Prize case got a lot of publicity because of the obvious benefit to the public of showing this documentary, this kind of thing happens to lots of films and tv shows. Remember WKRP? Well, they can’t make a DVD box set of it with the original music. Denis Hancock puts it best:
Now of course it’s important for music labels to protect their IP, make money from it, and all the rest. But for some reason I have this notion that if my Dad got to re-live one of his favorite shows (while paying for the privilege), and be reintroduced to some of his favorite music from the time he might do something crazy like try to buy the full songs or CDs! Or he might have me watch the show with him, like I vaguely remember doing many years ago – and I might hear music I never even knew existed! And I might buy something too!
Nope – can’t have that. If someone had an emotional reaction to Johnny Fever blaring the Ted Nugent rocker when the station mercifully flipped back from a temporary move to easy listening… can you imagine the chaos that might ensue? It must be far, far better to keep the music under lock and key and make sure no hears it so, er, money can be made. Right.
Shooting themselves in the foot, these people. I don’t understand it. Not to mention the real loss to the study of American movie and tv culture if these artifacts are destroyed. Sure libraries can archive these movies and shows (because of fair use). Libraries don’t archive everything. Sometimes they don’t know they need to until a professor comes to them and says, “Hey, I’m studying x. Do we have that available somewhere?” And then, sometimes, after a fruitless search, we find that x no longer exists.
Finally, we have the whole “analog hole” problem. The MPAA and the RIAA are attempting to close the analog hole, which is a) nearly impossible and b) would make it impossible to do some very basic tasks, like watch tv. Film studies folks have been granted permission to circumvent copy protection in order to make film clips for teaching and research, but ip owners are still forging ahead with making copy protection harder and harder to circumvent. One day, we may have to pay out the nose for equipment that will allow us to do our jobs.
So let’s review, the RIAA extorts money from people, publishers don’t understand fair use, we don’t have access to older video material because producers can’t afford to renew music licenses, and copy protection measures continue to increase. And I didn’t even talk about YouTube and Viacom. Great world we live in, eh?
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Hold onto your hats. Ironically, there’s no mention of the DMCA in the suit. YouTube already took down thousands of “unauthorized” videos. There’s an excellent discussion of the suit here. There’s some speculation that the suit has been brought simply because YouTube has been so successful. It’s by no means the only video sharing site out there with unauthorized material.
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I wasn’t going to write about this anymore, but I can’t help myself. Yesterday, the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property held a hearing on the issue of downloading on college campuses. Congressman Howard Berman suggests that colleges aren’t really doing enough to combat piracy. He claims colleges are hypocrites, saying:
Perhaps the most ironic issue is that many universities expect others to respect and protect their IP rights to scholarly works and inventions, but seem to disregard or close their eyes to the theft of the creative works of others. (via Ars Technica)
This is so far from the truth as to be laughable. I floated a question about how other schools were handling this situation to an email list of other IT managers. I got lots of responses outlining various strategies. Everyone is taking this seriously. Though we may serve as ISPs for our students, we don’t have the same resources as those ISPs. For example, most ISPs keep log files for 180 days, something we don’t do for space reasons. Now, though, we’ll be rethinking that.
In addition to having to rethink some of our practices, it was suggested that colleges and universities apply filtering software to our networks. We already do a lot of monitoring of our network. What they’re talking about is purchasing a commercial product. In some places, such a purchase may not cause an undue burden, but in places (like ours) where we’re already stretched pretty thin, this could be a real problem.
As our attorney said, what we really want to do is get back to what we’re here for: educating students. All of this is a big distraction.
Let me point out, for the record, that two of the key Congressmen advocating for these stricter measures are democrats. If any of your representatives are on this list, you might consider writing them.
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