Vanderbilt University RIAA class
p2pnet news view | RIAA News:- I’m starting to think there should be a separate RIAA affiliates category.
Almost exactly a year ago, “We want to play nice,” p2pnet quoted Cindy Frank, director of service delivery and project management for information technology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, continuing she was referring to Vanderbilt’s efforts to keep on the good side of the corporate music industry and its adherents, which had at that point so far cost it in the region of half-a-million-dollars.
“We’ve negotiated very inexpensive deals for students,” she said unblushingly. “Napster is $2 a month and offers 3 million songs. We have also spent a lot money and time marketing them. We encourage these legal methods for downloading music.”
The “bald faced admission from Frank in InsideVandy makes it clear not only is the university working — unpaid — for Napster, a desperately broke, hard-core commercial music marketing service, it’s also acting up-front for Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG,” we said, adding:
“Are Napster and the Big 4 footing the bill? No. That’s down to parents and state and federal authorities responsible for America’s educational systems. But that shouldn’t come as a surprise.”
Unpaid RIAA dupes
What do Harvard — not at all incidentally, the only major university to have escaped the RIAA’s attention — and Vanderbilt have in common?
They both feature RIAA-inspired classes.
Professor Charles Nesson now has a, “rather unusual, possibly unique, element to his Evidence 2008 course,” we said recently, going on:
“Under RIAA v University, frame a motion to, ‘quash a subpoena from a copyright holder to the university for the identity of a student downloader on grounds of undue burden,’ he says in what has to be one of the most apt law courses at any US school excepting, perhaps, Maine where two student lawyers are actively representing two university students.”
Harvard is also defending Joel Tenenbaum in case which has caught the attention of the mainstream media.
Here’s a Vanderbilt write-up on its project »»»
Ten first-year students in the ‘Stealing in Music City’ seminar were challenged to re-invent the music industry for a fair model of music distribution that eliminated, or at least discouraged, music piracy.
The class divided into three groups to devise a workable system for distributing music that delivers content for a reasonable price and allows songwriters, artists and other stakeholders to get paid. While each group approached the solution differently, there were common threads.
The government needs to be more involved.
All the students agreed that the government needs to regulate the usage of DRM (digital rights management), which individual companies like Sony, Apple and Microsoft currently use.
‘Fewer DRM rules make purchasing [versus pirating] music much more appealing,’ said Vanderbilt student Leslie Miller.
Other suggestions for more government involvement included:
- Actually running a neutral, nonprofit peer-to-peer network.
- Holding peer-to-peer network owners responsible for registering and policing users.
- Overseeing mandatory copyright education at the elementary and middle school level.
If consumers want peer-to-peer networks, give it to them via subscription services.
‘Instead of looking for a solution, the RIAA has attacked consumers,’ noted Vanderbilt student Brian Wilke. ‘Not much progress has been made.’
The students agreed that peer-to-peer networks are hugely popular, and rather than fighting them groups like the RIAA and record labels should join them and offer subscription services at reasonable rates for consumers.
While one group thought the government should create and oversee such a subscription service, the other students felt that a collective licensing arrangement, similar to the one employed by BMI, ASCAP and SESAC for radio broadcasts, would be effective.
Education, particularly among young people, is crucial to stopping music piracy.
‘Its amazing to me how many students dont understand the legalities of sharing intellectual property and copyrighted material,’ Sara Manus, education and outreach librarian, said. ‘But none of the students have had an education in copyright law – they listen to their peers about what they can and cannot do.’ Manus and colleague Holling Smith-Borne, director of the music library at Vanderbilts Blair School of Music, co-taught the class.
‘I admit that I used LimeWire before this class,’ said student Rachel Koblin. She went on to propose that education about piracy and copyright laws be implemented in public schools in a plan similar to No Child Left Behind.
Other students agreed that education in schools, the earlier the better, was important. One group even proposed ‘Project Rock the Schools,’ a series of concerts across the nation to help fund education about copyright.
Now you know.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
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December 8th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
There are so many holes, where do you start?
No one in the public sector, not holding a specialization in copyright law, can tell you the real ins and outs of copyright. While in the eyes of the law, ignorance is not an excuse, how can you expect the average Joe to understand copyright that takes first a lawyer who has passed his bar exam and then a continuing of the specialization of copyright for more years? These laws change often. Often enough that over my life alone, I don’t recognize what is now copyright from a laymans point of view, compared to what I knew it as when I was in school.
Yet the courts for some reason expect that a kid of 12 or 13 should know enough to be able to distinguish right from wrong? Certainly the holders are taking advantage in a big way on this when it comes to sue em all. Even the record execs own kids can’t tell its wrong as we have a public admittance of such happening. Yet the public doesn’t get the same break as the insiders kids do.
DRM has become a hated addition to material. No one but the holders like it. It’s to the point you don’t know when you buy something you are actually going to be able to use it, guaranteed. Yet you have to pay for on the faith it might. Games are probably the worst for this but music is not much different.
That was the purpose of having the emblem of the cd logo, to make sure the disc was compatible in all players. The majors no longer pay for the cd logo license as their discs no longer meet the standards that made sure it would play. So now it’s chancy to buy as you never know for sure.
P2P is great for on line social times, sharing, and being part of a group. Under the burden of being paid for it loses those attractions and becomes not the main themes but sidelined lessor possibilities and not the major given. So far all models I have heard of attempting to do this under the pay-for have simply not worked. In the process of making money, those attractions are lost.
I always hate to hear of this recommendation about in school education about copyright. It is never balanced with what is allowed and is instead piped right out of corporate offices as to what they want to see. Hence the balance is gone. It’s always one sided, for the corporate benefit. That’s not what copyright was given the monopoly for. Yet today it is very evident that copyright has gone awry and been hijacked for corporate advantage, while everything that supplied the other side for fair use as be thrown out the window.
This is not the first time in history this has happened. England and Europe went through much the similar. The US became a nation of pirates when it came to copyright during that time. Translations into English were treated as new works. Complaints by the copyright holders were totally ignored by the US government. So how can you enforce copyright without government acknowledgement that there is even a problem?
Yet everytime the government gets involved in some aspect of market, it becomes a twisted snake, no where resembling what it was intended to do. So government involvement in this is both hypocritical for historic setting as well as totally undesired for actual results.
Music labels have gone a long way in hiding whose property is whose. There are no fences on a digital copy. Nothing tells you when you get it whether it is copyrighted, under Creative Commons, or Public domain. The owners are not forthcoming with publicly searchable lists on the net to assist this. In fact they fight these types of identification tooth and nail, not to have to put it out for all to see. So something under copyright in digital form is a guessing game. Saying you should know, does not mean you do know.
Nor is there any positive way to tell just what you are getting in a digital file when you download it. You take it on faith and often enough you find that faith misplaced. So just because it has some title does not make it so. You can’t rely on the name, you can’t rely on metadata, and you are never positive till you have opened the file just what it is. Could be right but just as often, it contains malware, is misnamed, or isn’t even connected with what it represents itself to be.
The malware I am fairly sure is not copyrighted. Does the addition of malware make something different than the original? Enough that it is no longer the same material and different?
How do you hold p2p network owners responsible for collecting copyright fees? The internet has no boundaries. What is law in one country is not the same in the next. Collections are different as well. So are currency rates. Which one applies? When?
December 11th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
As one of the co-instructors of the class mentioned above, I thought that it would be helpful to clarify a few things. Mr. Smith-Borne and I designed this course last spring for first-year students taking part in The Commons living and learning experience. The Commons had several themes for these courses, including music. Given that music piracy is a hot topic these days, we were asked about the possibility of creating a course based on this topic by other faculty. Please note that this course was in now way sponsored, suggested, etc. by the R.I.A.A.
As librarians, Mr. Smith-Borne and I regularly work with intellectual property, and we have often taught sessions on music copyright to music majors at Vanderbilt. We are often in the position of having to tell students what they can’t do according to the law, without the opportunity to have an in-depth discussion about copyright. This class presented an ideal opportunity to delve into the subject. We had a variety of different stakeholders come to our class to talk to the students about how piracy affects their lives, and we heard many different viewpoints. The final project for the course asked the students to synthesize what they had read in their textbook (”Moser on Music Copyright”), information from the speakers, and their own research, and to use that information to build a solution that would balance the interests of record labels, artists, and consumers. As they themselves noted during their presentations, no solution is perfect. Copyright law is incredibly complex, and certain tactics to stop file-sharing have been at best, counterproductive. I give them credit for looking at the issue from a blalanced viewpoint that is based in fact.
If you would like a better idea of what they worked on during the course, take a look at the syllabus (posted on the syllabus above). I think that you will find it proof that Vanderbilt is not a “facototum for the R.I.A.A.”
Sincerely,
Sara J. Beutter Manus
Education and Outreach Librarian
Anne Potter Wilson Music Library
Vanderbilt University