September 15, 2003
The Copyfight: Back to School Edition
First day of school, so the idea of college-only digital music services is on my mind.
At first, there’s something quite appealing about these services. College students make up a large percentage of people on P2P services. If these services used CLs instead of something like iTunes, this would be an interesting way to try out the scheme on a lower level before using universally. In any case, it’d help stop infringement and get people the music they want – what more could we ask for, right?
A lot, according to Frank, and I generally agree. First, why should this be part of a university’s mission? Along with having Internet politics dominated by copyright, we now need copyright interests dominating university politics? This goes far beyond optionally supplying cable TV. While the universities are entering into this voluntarily, the fact that this is so removed from colleges’ typical purposes makes this seem more like blackmail than compromise. (Frank views this as part of a general trend towards universities’ seeing IP more like other copyright holders.)
Second, why the hell should my decision to go to School X mean that I have to give Y dollars to the RIAA? What about musicians not controlled by the RIAA who I typically purchase music from? Will it really be a full catalog of songs if such a thing does not exist in any current digital media service? What if I specifically don’t support the use of DRMed files and don’t want to fund them? Will people be able to opt out of the system? If so, how will colleges be able to keep the price down if they’re licensing unlimited music downloads and streams? Or is it not unlimited? Or is it some downloads and unlimited streams? Should the university just create some non-interactive radio stations at a lower rate, try to diversify their music offerings?
Unbelieveable that that discussion is even imaginable.
It is an “ugly solution” to one problem that’s likely to be an even uglier cause of many more. Yeah, it would fix a lot of things short term. But, long term, is this really where we want universities involved? If the cost of setting up one of these systems is really equal to colleges’ responding to DMCA requests, then I think we have far bigger fish to fry.
Filed by Derek Slater at 7:35 pm under 
1 Comment
Isn’t it great to be back to school? The classes, the friends, the parties, the legal threats…
I agree with your general assessment of the Campus P2P debate. The sad part is, I can see the fee for such a system being slipped in unnoticed with the “communication technology support fee” many schools charge. If on the off chance someone did notice, they would likely be up against the unwinnable battle of fighting their school’s financial bureaucracy. I don’t relish the idea of explaining to some Accounts Receivable monkey why I refuse to pay $25 of that $125 IT fee. It’s little hassles that slip this stuff by uncontested. I hope nobody actually goes through with it.