On the heels of yesterday’s post about USC’s lunatic copyright policy, many readers have written in with more examples of copyright lunacy on USC and other campuses, instances in which scholarship is being trumped by a desire to appease the entertainment industry, enforcing rules that don’t take any account of the limits put on copyright by lawmakers in order to preserve public rights and especially the right of scholars and researchers to pursue their work.
USC has a pretty crummy track-record here: A USC student who was downloading copies of Larry Lessig’s FreeCulture, a book distributed via BitTorrent and Grokster at the behest of its author, was censured by USC for installing the app. He got kicked off the campus network and told that he would not be allowed back on until he promised to uninstall all general-purpose file-sharing software. He wrote letters of protest to the university about this, but never heard back.
Draconian, indiscriminate measures against file-share are par for the course at USC, as is the black-hole treatment for people who get snared in the dragnet. Aram Sinnreich, a USC grad student studying file sharing, who was an expert witness at the Grokster court case, was censured for using BitTorrent, and never received a response to his letter, either.
USC’s arch-rival UCLA is a somewhat better steward of its students’ interests in the copyright wars, as reported by Cindy Mosqueda at Metroblogging LA, who notes that UCLA’s approach is mostly one of warning students about the crazies down the raod in Hollywood and their willingness to destroy your life to prop up their business model, but does not extend to actively policing students on their behalf. This is affirmed in last spring’s letter to students from the Dean and Archchancellor.
Related Posts
- Open Letter to Universities Whose Students Have Been Targeted by the RIAA
- ‘Suggestions to College Students Being Targeted by the RIAA’
- U of Washington to Help the RIAA Sue Students
- NCSU Legal Services Director Helps Students Fight the RIAA
- RIAA nabs 45 on-campus (Keene State College, NH) Students for Illegal Downloads
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