Universities Penalized for Past RIAA Cooperation

Even though volume of DMCA takedown notices has increased dramatically, are having a tough time claiming "undue burden" in court.

It’s been a long, strange trip for many universities and colleges who’ve been compliant with RIAA requests to cooperate with copyright infringement investigations. For despite their increased compliance with DMCA takedown notices or assistance in forwarding pre-litigation "settlement" letters to students, the RIAA is still unsatisfied.

In fact, much to chagrin of colleges and universities around the country, it was just a week ago that the RIAA succeeded in getting Congress to pass the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) mandating the use of content filters on campus networks. Getting the Feds involved rightly made many feel that their efforts were being disregarded.

"They’re pressing for legislative proposals at both the federal and state level that we think are really inappropriate," said John C. Vaughn, executive VP of the Association of American Universities. The proposals call for government policies "that would go against issues of privacy or academic openness that we think are important to maintain," he said.

The Common Solutions Group (CSG), a consortium of 25 educational institutions that includes some of this countries best and brightest like Harvard, UC Berkeley, Princeton, Brown, Stanford, Cornell, Columbia, Georgetown, and MIT, have already looked at the leading “infringement suppression” technologies required to be deployed by the HEOA and concluded that they were expensive, not very effective, and could suppress legitimate as well as infringing traffic.

Regardless, the HEOA now only requires the President’s signature to become law.

In the meantime, colleges and universities are trying to fight back against the all out assault by the RIAA and others which they are now starting to see may jeopardize the free flow of data and information across campus networks.

Some, like The University of Oregon, Marshall University, and Morehead State University, have tried to fight RIAA subpoenas seeking the identities of suspected file-sharers in court by arguing that they are an "undue burden," that they can’t possibly identify with certainty any and all individuals by a given IP address.

The RIAA has used their past cooperation against them, noting that if there wasn’t "undue burden" before that there couldn’t be one now, but this tactic is starting to backfire as colleges and universities are starting to see the handwriting on the wall, that the RIAA won’t be satisfied until has complete control of campus networks.

"At the point where universities finally come to see they’re the target of this RIAA campaign, that’s the point at which they’ll start arguing their own self-interest," says Charles R. Nesson, founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

This tipping point appears to be at hand.

Related Posts

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2. Harvard Law: ‘Universities Should Tell the RIAA to Take a Hike’
3. RIAA Steps Up Campus File-Sharing War, Says Using ‘Better Software, More Servers’
4. Duke Now Requires RIAA to Have Proof of Illegal File-Sharing
5. U of Kansas Won’t GIve up File-Sharing Students to the RIAA