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I have heard a couple of professors say that some students are so ingenious when it comes to cheating on tests that the profs feel they should give the students credit for their resourcefulness, even while they fail them on the tests. University administrators, however, are taking a harder stance when it comes to another common form of cheating on campuses: music piracy.
Higher stakes in music piracy enforcement
The state of Tennessee and its public university system just raised the ante in this game of digital cat and mouse. Last year, Ars Technica reported that the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, had the fourth-highest number of copyright notices sent by the RIAA. Last week, as is reported today in Wired:
Combating music piracy at Tennessee's public university system is more important than hiring teachers and keeping down tuition costs.
Just-signed legislation requires the 222,000-student system to spend an estimated $9.5 million (.pdf) for file sharing "monitoring software," "monitoring hardware" and an additional "recurring cost of $1,575,000 for 21 staff positions and benefits (@75,000 each) to monitor network traffic" of its students.
Tennessee's measure, (.pdf) approved Wednesday by Gov. Phil Bredesen, was the nation's first in a bid to combat online file sharing within state-funded universities. The law, similar versions of which the Recording Industry Association of America wants throughout the United States, comes as the Tennessee public university system is increasing tuition, laying off teachers and leaving unfilled vacant instructor positions to battle a $43.7 million shortfall.
The law is the first of its kind in the nation.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation opines,
Unfortunately, the entertainment industry lobby seems to be succeeding, bit-by-bit, in persuading legislators to coerce universities into buying "infringement suppression" technologies -- expensive technologies that won't stop file sharing on campus networks. Even if the technologies did work (magical thinking in light of encryption), does anyone think they would somehow force students back into record stores or the iTunes Store? After all, today students on campus can swap multiple gigabytes hand-to-hand for pennies (see, e.g., blank DVD-R disks, or the price of portable hard drives, as well as the ease of copying from iPod to iPod).
It makes no sense to force universities to spend millions on technologies that will hobble innovation on campus while failing to stop file-sharing. Why not use those millions to compensate creators and copyright owners, and thereby make file-sharing legal, instead? Now, more than ever, the universities need to come forward with a collective licensing proposal that will protect their campus communities and their own bottom lines.
I have to side with the EFF on this one. If universities are going to support intellectual and artistic endeavor, then they should be funding file-swapping systems that reimburse artists and (to a lesser extent, in my lefty view) recording labels instead of just compensating the RIAA for its legal fees. (Note: Some universities are siding with their students instead of with the RIAA.)
In addition, many universities don't need any more bureaucracy or stricter cybersecurity policies--trust me on this one. My own campus employs 28,000 people and many of the staff are finding themselves on computers and office networks so locked down that they have to bring personal laptops to work and hop on wireless networks to, well, get any work done.
The crackdown on music piracy on campuses of course also affects students. Earlier this month, the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, reported that some students have had to drop out of school in order to save up enough to pay the legal fees and fines associated with RIAA lawsuits.
First-year students in a Vanderbilt University course titled "Stealing in Music City" are looking for a more equitable solution. The instructors of the course explain their motives:
“We are challenging the students to re-invent the music industry for a fair model of music distribution to compensate artists, consumers and labels,” said Holling Smith-Borne, director of the music library at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music. The class, divided into three groups, will propose three solutions during class on Dec. 2.
Smith-Borne and Sara Manus, education and outreach librarian, developed the course after the Recording Industry Association of America sued college students, some at Vanderbilt, for illegally downloading music. Manus and Smith-Borne felt there was a need to help educate students on these issues.
“It’s amazing to me how many students don’t understand the legalities of sharing intellectual property and copyrighted material,” Manus said. “But none of the students have
