Harvard Law Professor Urges University to Fight RIAA 180
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Distinguished Harvard University Law School Professor Charles Nesson has called upon Harvard University to fight back against the RIAA and stand up for its students, writing 'Seeking to outsource its enforcement costs, the RIAA asks universities to point fingers at their students, to filter their Internet access, and to pass along notices of claimed copyright infringement. But these responses distort the University's educational mission. ...[W]e should be assisting our students both by explaining the law and by resisting the subpoenas that the RIAA serves upon us. We should be deploying our clinical legal student training programs to defend our targeted students.'"
wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Authority (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting possibilities (Score:5, Insightful)
Ooh, this raises some intriguing possibilities. If a university's legal faculty 'n' lawyers-to-be rally around the students, a whole body of experience will quickly build up. By the time they become fully-fledged lawyers, a whole bunch of students will be familiar with the xxAA and their tactics.
Could lead to some interesting exam projects, too; "Find a granny being sued by the RIAA and prepare a suitable defense. For bonus credit, find a granny who doesn't have a computer but is being sued by the RIAA."
Thank you (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Authority (Score:4, Insightful)
-why did we fight riaa anyways?
-i dunno lol, harvard was doing it
Re:About Time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Authority (Score:2, Insightful)
law schools (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Authority (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:law schools (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah real smart for the **AA's to go marching into a den of hundreds (if not over a thousand) highly vicious (Type-A personality) lions (Lawyers). (parenthetical commentary FTW)
Re:Authority (Score:2, Insightful)
Finally, a ray of hope! (Score:5, Insightful)
So, Harvard fighting the RIAA, if publicized correctly by the media, will get the attention of everyone around the world. Take the MIT dean issue that came up recently, for example. That was splashed all across the news channels everywhere in the world!
I am currently in India and it was quite a talk here when the MIT news came out. I'm talking about local news channel covering the story! If the same happens with Harvard's move, is could almost be certain that people can will be educated more about the problem and its impact on internet downloads.
Re:Authority (Score:5, Insightful)
The law isn't on their side when it comes to going on a fishing expedition. Also, the number of cases that the RIAA has won in court so far (that is NOT the same as people settling) isn't very high, and their cases being thrownn out isn't exactly unheard of..
I'd rather think that a law professor has some idea about this, and about the legal risks in general. I would even go as far as suggesting that he probably has a lot more of an idea then you and me together.
Are these colleges prepared to take the risk of losing everything to stand up for their students?
Is this society prepared to destoy such colleges and their future in order to protect the ill-gotten exclusive rights of an industry that is doomed to failure?
Re:law schools (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry for singing a different harmony here, folks...
Re:Professor's downloads? (Score:4, Insightful)
The licensing cost wasn't so much the issue (something like $30/year (USD) on a given example. The hard pill to swallow, is it required a bunch of paperwork, with two weeks to review, and decide if to grant or decline license for the song. But worse still is that it would take up to and beyond 8 weeks to actually grant said license.
Upon reviewing several thousand songs over several hours from garageband.com, we found one creative commons song that was suitable. And got permission from the author of another, very appropriate song, for use of it... The songs are encoded, and embedded into flash files, and streamed at a lower quality in mono (mainly for bandwidth issues). As much as the system in play for online/internet radio sucks... it would be nice to have a better interface for licensing a song for playback on a website, without direct access to a higher quality digital recording... One shouldn't have to jump through so many hoops...
On a side note, at least now my wife, and a few relatives have a much better understanding of how F'd up copyright law is, between this issue, and trying to get copies of photos for use at the funeral.
Re:"Defenseless" is no excuse for infringement (Score:3, Insightful)
You'd think so, but the MAFIAA has also been threatening people without computers, dead people, and small children. There's really no evidence that any of the threats they've sent would stand up in a trial, since so far the cases that have gone to trial are going rather poorly for the MAFIAA.
Being "relatively defenseless families without lawyers or ready means to pay" is not justification for violating copyright. I don't have the an attorney on retainer or the means to pay, but that doesn't mean I can speed or violate traffic laws with impunity. "But judge, I can't afford the ticket so I shouldn't be prosecuted" won't fly very far in court. People in this country need to start taking responsibility for themselves.
You may not be able to violate traffic laws with impunity, but police officers, judges, and politicians routinely do so. What does that tell you about the legal system and how people with money and power can abuse it? The MAFIAA has enough lawyers on retainer to simply scare normal people into settlements which cost less than a proper legal defense. It's pure extortion and racketeering.
Re:"Defenseless" is no excuse for infringement (Score:5, Insightful)
You presuppose that they are guilty, which is not the way the law works. Innocent until proven guilty, and these students have not been proven guilty. In addition, they have a right to defend themselves regardless of whether they are innocent or guilty. As things stand, they don't have the resources to defend themselves. The professor is proposing that they be given the resources to do so.
Even the guilty should be able to defend themselves in court.
Re:Authority (Score:1, Insightful)
When students' families are bankrupted by RIAA lawsuits and they can't afford college anymore, their future is called "burger flipping" and "trash hauling". They won't be in any position to do anything.
Colleges and schools are strapped for money, they can't fight an economical juggernaut like the RIAA.
Imagine you're a student: you get sued, you will probably lose, and even if you don't your opponent can afford to drag the suit out until you're bankrupted. It's either shut up and think about yout future, or a lifetime stuck with a menial job and, possibly, debt slavery.
The students and colleges don't have a chance. Big money has enough economical and political power to make resistance useless. Deal with it, it's over. It has been over since the beginning.
One statement bothers me... (Score:4, Insightful)
"We need not condone infringement to conclude that 19th- and 20th-century copyright law is poorly suited to promote 21st-century knowledge."
Now, I may not be a lawyer, but I am a professional writer, and an author, and part of my profession requires me to have a working understanding of copyright law. So, this statement bothers me for a couple of reasons:
1. It does not differentiate between copyright law and patent law. Copyright law is actually quite good at allowing for the promotion of knowledge, as you cannot copyright an idea - only the exact implementation of one. Patent law, on the other hand, has become very restrictive in regards to the promotion of knowledge, and you CAN patent an idea. (You can patent a tax strategy, for crying out loud.)
2. I don't know enough about 19th century copyright law, but frankly, 20th century copyright law based on the Berne Convention is quite good at what it does, and doesn't really need to be fixed. At best, it needs minor modifications.
Expanding on the second point, there seems to be a "shiny thing" reaction in the copyright industry in regards to the Internet, and it really does miss the point. The RIAA, legislators, and even some lawyers are spending a lot of time panicking in awe at the shiny new Internet and what it can do, and failing to notice that at the end of the day, a work is either infringed or it isn't, just like it was before the 'net. As far as the actual letter of the law is concerned, how it got that way is really unimportant.
(Think of it this way - somebody figures out how to commit a murder over the Internet by making his/her victim's keyboard deliver a deadly electric shock. Do the murder laws now need to be rewritten? Of course not - at the end of the day, it's still murder, plain and simple.)
If you look at the Berne Convention, you see:
1. Respect for the creator's wishes for their work.
2. Ability for the creator to transfer rights and copyright.
3. Allowance for fair use and the use of ideas, but not exact implementations, in derivative works.
4. Allowance for public domain.
5. A recognition that these rights and provisions apply to new media.
If you think about it, it's simple, covers all the bases, allows for everything from Creative Commons to the Open Source movement to a novelist receiving royalties in any media - and has been around in its current form since the 1970s. I wouldn't call it a broken tool at all. I just wish people would stop panicking because there's a new shiny thing and coming up with daft measures (Vista-style DRM anybody?) to protect against it.
Unfair Copyright Laws are Creating This (Score:4, Insightful)
Existing works had already been created under the copyright laws of the time. (28 years plus one extension of 28 more years). The laws fully served their purpose of encouraging the creative arts. No change in the law afterwards would change what had been done. These works should have moved into the public domain, where new artists could freely use them to create even newer works to enrich society. Instead, the content creation industry got Congress to enrich them by extending unreasonably the time of protection. Congress did not represent the people at large that day.
The President failed in his job by signing this bill, and The Supreme Court failed miserably in their job of understanding the intent in the US Constitution by upholding the unwarranted extensions. And the court system now fails even more miserably by permitting the RIAA suits to exist in the first place, and then be dropped in ways that cost never-convicted defendants tens of thousands of reimbursed dollars, the moment the RIAA might lose. All this while the RIAA tries to trick the courts into granting them rights never included in the original legislation. If the RIAA can fool uninformed judges into creating precedents to be used in future cases, they will have de facto created new law for themselves.
Filesharing should be viewed as an act of civil disobedience against an industry that has received out-of-proportion, and unconstitutional, protection from all three branches of the government.
Re:Authority (Score:3, Insightful)
Since the society is ruled by politicians who are paid by that very industry, I'd say that the answer is "yes".