Harvard Law Professor Urges University to Fight RIAA

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.'"

His daugther works on a PhD in CS at Harvard

[null-und-eins]

Nesson's daughter Rebecca (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~nesson/) works on a PhD in CS after going to Law School. Hence, you can be sure that he is very well aware of the discussion inside the CS community. Rebecca won Google's Anita Borg Fellowship 2007 (http://www.google.com/anitaborg/) and I remember here as a very nice person all around.

Re:Interesting possibilities

[IP_Troll]

A legal clinics are typically free, so this also removes RIAA's threat that "you are going to spend more in attorney's fees fighting us, so you should just settle for $X,000".

Re:Authority

[viksit]

_If_ Harvard ends up resisting. _IF_ Yale joins in. _IF_ Columbia, which was targeted as one of the 12 piracy-propogating schools decides to join on the bandwagon. Who knows, the ivy league might just end up doing something as a team.

Those are a lot of big ifs, imho.

Copyright Law

[deAtog]

With all the talk about this recently, I'm surprised someone hasn't mentioned this sooner... Granted I'm not a lawyer, but last I read, copyright law explicitly states that it is perfectly legal for students attending an educational institution to make a copy of any copyrighted work for educational purposes. Who's to say the students in question weren't doing so for this exact purpose?

Re:Authority

[archmedes5]

If they lose this fight, they'll singlehandedly make the "Ivy League" a thing of the past. I'm not siding with the RIAA here, but the law, unfortunately, is on their side. Are these colleges prepared to take the risk of losing everything to stand up for their students?

Re:Professor's downloads?

[rs79]

I met Charlie Neesan once when the icann stuff was getting started in Cambridge. He's (very) good people. He also taught Lessig, Edeleman Molly "babe" van Howling and Zittrain.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

a) He is a lawyer.

b) You suggest that if he were a lawyer, there would be a contridiction [sic] in terms by him being a man of integrity. The implication is that lawyers have no integrity. A person can have or lack integrity in the things they do or in the ways they do them. Since you are presumably not a lawyer, you don't have the background necessary to begin to know the ways in which lawyers do things, the tools at their disposal, and so on. So I'm presuming that you find integrity inherently lacking in the positions they argue. However, even if you found EVERY single lawsuit and prosecution to be frivolous and unjust, in our adversarial system, lawyers (almost always) exist on both sides, so even then you could criticize no more than approximately 50% of lawyers for advocating immoral positions.

Are you really going to say that the people defending IBM against SCO's suit -- and the people helping IBM at Novell -- lack integrity for what they're doing?

Anti-lawyer rhetoric is dangerous. They're the last bulwark against an oppressive government.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/11/13/AR2005111301061.html [washingtonpost.com]