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.
I am feeling a bit like New Kid today–pretty cranky–and I was going to write something random, but I wanted to comment a bit more on the proposed House legislation that would require colleges and universities to provide legal options for downloading music and require them to have a plan to prevent illegal downloading. Dean Dad already expresses some good reasons why the bill is a bad idea. His commenters, however, don’t seem to completely understand the law nor how networks work enough to know how crazy this really is.
One commenter notes that higher ed moves too slowly for this to get implemented. By the time it gets out of committee, they suggest, the provision will be dead. Unfortunately, at many institutions, technology decisions such as these don’t go through faculty committee. Software and hardware purchases (big ones) are made all the time without any faculty input. Sometimes the IT department may try to get input and the faculty say, whatever, we don’t understand what you’re saying so just do what you need to do. This varies by school, obviously, but I’m in touch with enough schools to know it’s not unusual.
Another commenter suggests that students should get the music from the library. If they rip that music and make a copy for themselves, that’s illegal. At least as I interpret the law. I also feel that copying a whole book for yourself would be illegal.
Another commenter says “If somebody is breaking the law, call the police. Throw the book at them. If they’re not, get the hell out and leave them alone.” This is more complicated than it might seem. When someone’s “caught” “downloading,” they’re actually not caught downloading at all. They’re caught sharing their music. Most p2p programs having a shared folder which is “on” by default. Some programs ask where your music is stored and share that instead or in addition to the folder where the downloads go. It’s possible to have not downloaded anything, in fact, and be sharing your whole music collection for others to download. And that is illegal. Secondly, when someone is caught sharing, all the RIAA or other agent has is an ip address and a time-date stamp for when the activity allegedly took place. They need the colleges to provide them with identifying information in order to “call the police.” Right now, the DMCA protects all isps from being liable for illegal activity on their network as long as they forward any notices about the activity to the user associated with the ip address. This is why as the commenter says, “it seems to be the college’s responsibility to do something about it.” The way the law is written and interpreted now, if we don’t, they will come sue us. This has not been really tested yet, so no one knows for sure if that’s what would happen, but that’s the assumption. One way this could work is for the RIAA to be required to submit subpoenas for every violation. That’s a much more time-consuming and costly process for them, so they’re not inclined to do that. From our perspective the work load is the same whether we get a subpoena or not.
Who knows what they mean by providing legal alternatives for downloading. It could very well mean providing access to iTunes by just installing it on the public machines. Or it could mean requiring a subscription service. Preventing illegal downloading would be difficult and costly. Dean Dad’s right, both of these would be onerous in some places. Maybe some of the richer schools would be able to do this but many schools couldn’t afford it. I concur with Dean Dad: “I’d rather spend public aid to higher education on scientific research and faculty and libraries and tutoring and daycare and textbooks than on Napster.”
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 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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The RIAA is increasing its efforts to stop downloading on college campuses. Their new strategy involves sending out settlement letters to students. The letters, presumably, will be more threatening than the current takedown notices they send out regularly. I happen to be our campus DMCA agent. I’m the one who receives those takedown notices and who forwards them to the students. I had read the article referenced above, but because we receive so few notices in the first place (about 1/month), I figured we probably didn’t have anything to worry about. Monday morning, however, I received a notice that one of these letters would be sent soon. The language was indeed more threatening and the word “subpoena” appeared in the letter. So we traipsed off to the lawyer’s office to discuss strategy.
I’m not thrilled to be the DMCA agent. I know downloading is illegal. I don’t condone it. But I believe that it is (maybe just was) a reaction to an industry that didn’t keep up with the capabilities of new technology. Even though the industry does now provide legal ways to download music, movies, and tv shows, there’s still the DRM issue. Many people, myself included, have issues with DRM. For some, that means they find legal ways to obtain DRM-free music. Others resort to downloading.
Even though I will do my job as the DMCA agent, I was still feeling a little creepy about the whole thing. The new strategy felt a little more draconian, and I didn’t want to become more draconian in response. Kenneth Green articulates a possible reason for my discomfort. College students may be unfairly targeted. Why isn’t the RIAA going after more individuals in homes? Or better yet, people who make pirate copies of CDs and DVDs? In fact, Green says, the strategies offered by the RIAA to combat illegal downloading smack of extortion (one option is to provide access to legal music downloading). Green says that when asked about why the RIAA was focusing on colleges instead of ISPs, they said “the consumer broadband providers view litigation as a cost of doing business, while, in contrast, the RIAA knows that colleges and universities, when presented with the threat of litigation, will ‘jump.’” In other words, we may be low-hanging fruit for them.
At some point, I think the RIAA is going to have to figure out ways to allow people to buy music legally and to share it legally, not via these P2P programs, but in similar ways that we always have–the digital version of mixtapes. DRM sometimes makes this difficult. Maybe I’m being idealistic, but maybe if they stop treating their consumers as criminals, they’ll stop acting like criminals. A little mutual respect might go a long way.
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