March 4, 2003
You Had Me, Then You Lost Me
I’m going to agree with Frank regarding this article. The arguments about impairing fair use, reducing privacy, and chilling legal uses – those all make sense. I also like what Ms. Hilden has to say about carving out exemptions for educational uses.
Once Ms. Hilden started talking about the “seriousness’ of piracy as a crime and how the university should handle it as en loco parentis, then she lost me.
To me, it’s this simple: All I would ask a university to do is follow the law. Follow notice and takedown and, when legally compelled, block access to people misusing the network. If you want to disobey the law as some form of civil disobediance, that’s up to you. But don’t police your network any more than the law forces you to. Don’t actively monitor students, but respond to copyright owners’ requests.
This does not mean I agree that notice-and-takedown is a fair process. I think there’s far too much burden right now on the file traders and their ISPs.
Still, I don’t see any reason for the university to think of itself any different from an ISP in this circumstance. I don’t see why they should be dealing with these issues internally, by penalizing file swappers. And I don’t see how/why universities should shield their students from legal liabilty. Students are responsible for what they do on the network. Why should the university be responsible? Why should they act as parents for these adults?
The only thing universities should actively do is try to keep Congress from draconian regulations of universites’ networks. To the extent that universites already suffer because of the DMCA, universities should lobby against it.
Filed by Derek Slater at 2:19 pm under General news
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