P2p file sharing and the law.
p2pnet.net News:- The University of St Thomas is in St Paul, Minnesota and its school online newspaper, the Bulletin, has a feature called Tech Tuesday from Information Resources and Technologies.
Today’s post shows just how hard the Big Four Organized Music cartel is working to get even more US teaching institutions signed up as unpaid product marketing and copyright enforcement divisions.
Actually, ‘unpaid’ is incorrect because, of course, fees and taxpayer money provide the wherewithall.
Meanwhile, “Since Sept. 1, 2006, the University of St. Thomas has been contacted nearly 100 times by the Recording Industry Association of America and others representing copyright holders regarding the illegal offering of music, software or other kinds of programming via a peer-to-peer network application, such as Napster or Gnutella,” says the post.
In point of fact, you guys over at Information Resources and Technologies, way back, the Big Four, Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, greased Napster into Penn State – the first school to become one with Hollywood and the labels – precisely because it’s not illegal.
Rather, is Napster now a paid-up, rock-solid corporate citizen unsuccessfully touting over-priced, cookie-cutter Big Four product. And Gnutella is a file sharing network.
Anyway, “These 91 cases compare to less than a dozen in the entire spring semester of 2006,” says the Bulletin. “In each of these cases, the notice from the RIAA informs the university that the sharing activity is both illegal and unauthorized by the copyright owner; further, the notice asks the university to disable access to the infringing recording.”
The post goes on:
Once the notice is received, staff members in IRT immediately act to disable network access by the computer that is hosting the illegal activity. This “notice and take down” process is designed to provide some protection for copyright owners, and is a process with which most universities readily comply.
Federal copyright law prohibits the unauthorized copying of intellectual property (books and recordings). Hosting illegal copies of songs, TV shows, movies or software on your computer and making these resources available to others via a sharing network constitutes the illegal copying of the material.
There are two perspectives on this issue – the music industry refers to the sharing of songs and movies as “theft,” which is perhaps a harsher term for what it is – the infringement of the rights of the copyright owner. At the same time, users of peer-to-peer networks like to say that they are “sharing” not “stealing” – although, again, it is different than sharing your toys, which everyone agrees is a good thing. In the case of online sharing, you keep your “toy” while your friend gets another copy of your toy – it is being reproduced by the user rather than purchased from the creator.
While there is an ongoing debate on copyright in the United States, the fact remains that it is illegal to share copyrighted material via the network. In addition, this activity places a high demand on the bandwidth assigned to the UST network and contributes, at least in part, to slowness in computing performance systemwide.
The University of St. Thomas takes compliance with the law seriously. Even when there is a gap between technology and the statutes of the state and nation, it is responsible, right and ethical to respect the law.
(Thanks, Frankie)
Also See:
Bulletin -Peer-to-peer file sharing and the law, November 7, 2006
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November 13th, 2006 at 7:01 am