p2pnet - rss feed: MPAA, RIAA, score in Higher-Ed Bill
p2pnet news view MPAA | RIAA News:- “Andrea - you got it all wrong. If I were the entertainment industry I would be pretty embarrassed that all I got for all the lobbying effort and campaign contributions was a ‘plan’ and making colleges be the marketing arm for products that students don’t want.
“They keep aiming at the wrong target - the general public and the commercial ISPs are the real problem - that and the need to finally respond to want their cutomers want … duh!”
That’s a comment post to Andrea Foster’s Wired Campus story that the Hollywood studios’ MPAA and Big 4 labels’ RIAA have “prevailed” in the “longstanding battle between the higher-education community and the entertainment industry over how aggressive colleges should be in trying to stop the swapping of music and video files over campus networks”.
The renewal of the Higher Education Act would force colleges to use ‘technology-based deterrents’ to stop students from sharing copyrighted works over the P2P networks, says the story, going on:
“The industry also succeeded in attaching language to the bill that would force colleges ‘to the extent practicable’ to offer students music and video through subscription-based services such as Ruckus Network Inc.
However, Educause says students don’t want to use, or pay for, subscription-based music services.
“The group also argues that computer tools to deter copyright infringement, like Audible Magic’s CopySense, are expensive and don’t always work,” says Wired Campus, adding:
“Many colleges use packet-shaping software to detect which students are hogging too much bandwidth - often the result of swapping music files - and to stop the behavior. But it’s unclear whether that practice would qualify as a ‘technology-based deterrent’ under the bill.”
But all this really does is put an official stamp on blatant activities which have been staged ever since the RIAA and MPAA started targeting students, using educational institutions as enforcement and marketing divisions with teachers, administrators, legal and technical staff co-opted as unpaid support workers, their extracurricular activities funded by tax-payers and the schools themselves.
Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG got the ball rolling by shoehorning the disinterred Napster corpse into Penn State as early as 2003, using the p2p application which started it all to springboard similar technologies into other schools up and down the country .
And the entertainment cartels have forging ahead ever since, using the spurious movie and music industry inspired Joint Committee of Higher Education and Entertainment Communities to dress the whole cynical vested-interest operation up as a genuine inter-industry, inter-school exercise.
.
.Stumble It!
Wired Campus - Recording and Movie Industries Win Out Over Colleges in Higher-Education Bill, July 30, 2008
movie and music industry inspired - Penn State’s Spanier: RIAA all the way, January 1, 2008
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July 30th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
I’m really really curious, how is all this internet filtering gonna stop copying?
I can see how this will go. The student goes home for summer, downloads movies and music all summer, stuffs it on an external hard drive and returns to college. Instead of taking several hours of the uni’s internet time to download, they will just swap external drives to copy all they wish, file trading without the net. Only difference here is that they will now have the choice of 250 to 500 gigs of stuff to grab, without having to get on the net. Looks to me like all they did was remove the trace route from the net.
I suspect that with all the bad PR the RIAA has generated for the music industry, that most students don’t want the mainstream crap coming out the major studios. Not only will they not want it today but in the future as well. This is what happened with brand name recognition, repeat buyers, and the automotive industry in the states. Their product was so bad back in the late 70’s and early 80’s that they started hemorrhaging from lost business. Today the #1 worldwide auto maker isn’t one from the states, it’s Toyota who makes a better product for the money. The stateside automakers never did recover from the bad PR that their poorly made, low quality products, gave them. You can look for a repeat of this unlearned history lesson yet again for music and if it doesn’t change directions, from movies as well.
More and more people are turning to games. Computer games saw a rough 20% gain in sales while music is slowly losing ground as a less desirable option for the entertainments discretionary income the average household has to spend. All this while the economy is headed into a recession. Music is headed the same way the major automotive makers here in the states went and for much the same reasons.
July 30th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Any decent music artists don’t get the same recognition or PR these days for some reason. Even Neil Diamond, whose previous and current albums are quite good, are virtually unknown releases despite using a top infamous label
July 31st, 2008 at 10:07 am
The previous posters hit the main problem on the head: college students do not remotely care about half the crap that passes for music nowadays that the music industry tries to push on them. If they would open up their FULL catalogs, even from decades ago, to a one dollar a song download, every student in America would gladly hop on board, the RIAA would make hundreds of millions of dollars of profit, the sue-em-all campaign would grind to a halt, and *everyone* would be happy!
But nooOOOoo…the music industry is way too arrogant to even consider doing somehing like that. The idiots.