UCLA as RIAA cop
p2pnet.net News:- In April, the University of California at Los Angeles, famed for its pioneering and adventurous spirit, became the second US university to come up with home-baked software meant to allow it it to act as an on-campus, entertainment industry cop.
At the time, Hollywood “applauded administrators at UCLA” and Matthew Grossman, director of digital strategy at the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America)said, “I think it’s great that they’re being so proactive about enforcing copyright protection.”
However, although UCLA is “using technology to discourage Net piracy of films or music,” it’s, “holding off on playing campus snoop, a school official said Monday at the Digital Hollywood conference here”.
The quote comes in a CNET story which also says, “An implementation of the Automated Copyright Notice System, or ACNS – an open-source notification software – the system lets UCLA instantly send notices of copyright infringement to students by e-mail and restrict their network access until they have removed the offending file.”
How do the university authorities know a student is “infringing”? By telepathy? Or do they rely solely on RIAA claims? And does “holding off” imply a temporary situation and that restraints, such as they are, might eventually be lifted?
The story goes on to say other universities and content providers are increasingly embracing technology from Audible Magic and others to attach digital fingerprints to copyrighted works and keep tabs on students’ file-swapping – technology backed by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and MPAA.
Audible Magic is the company chosen by the RIAA to front the spurious contention that the company’s trivial software can accurately pin-point unwanted content in decentralised p2p networks and filter it out.
As the EFF’s (Electronic Frontier Foundation) Chris Palmer pointed out some time back, the RIAA has been, “touting technologies offered by Audible Magic as the cure for peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing on university (and high school!) campuses. The company has also been making the rounds of congressional offices in Washington, DC, talking up its technologies as a silver bullet for P2P infringement.
“While we at EFF support universities taking steps to educate staff and students about copyright law and to control excessive bandwidth usage, it is important that universities are not sold expensive, ineffective solutions simply to appease the public relations needs of the RIAA. It is also important that policymakers not be misled by the bullish pronouncements of the RIAA and Audible Magic regarding the effectiveness of ‘acoustic filtering’ technologies.”
A Jesuit secondary school in California was the first educational institution to trust the RIAA’s Audio Magic ‘filter’ on its school network.
But UCLA students needn’t worry.
Poking people with sharp sticks
“That technology is not attractive to us, because what students are doing is private,” CNET quotes Jonathan Curtiss, of UCLA Student Services, as saying. Rather, “we’re encouraging a behavioral shift.”
The article goes on to highlight various commercial operations using Big Music’s sue ‘em all campaign to funnel Big Music ‘product’ into institutions of higher learning across America and, interestingly, has Todd Richmond, managing director for the Annenberg Center for Communication also in Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, saying USC is testing a music file-sharing portal that lets students remix or loop music on a shared network, and that the school, “can do this legally under a creative commons license”.
CNET quotes him as saying, “We’re very interested in peer-to-peer technology and the ability of individual computers to seamlessly transfer data around – in a legal way.”
It also has him saying educators have complained that Net access has disrupted the classroom experience because, “students will mindlessly surf the Web and ignore discussion”.
But according to CNET, “USC’s strategy going forward is to encourage students to log on wirelessly during class and use Google or another search engine to research what professors say and bring more questions to the debate. ‘We want wireless uniformity because then someone can Google what the professor says and question it. And this opens a dialogue in class,’said Richmond, who added that ‘professors don’t like the idea’.
It also quotes him as saying, “This is the future and we want to poke people with sharp sticks.”
Are Curtiss’ views circulating on the EDUCAUSE network, one wonders?
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See:-
home-baked software – UCLA becomes Hollywood enforcer, p2pnet, April 29, 2004
offending file – UCLA to stop short of P2P snooping, CNET News, September 28, 2004
spurious contention – P2p ops decry RIAA filter claims, p2pnet, March 4, 2004
first – Jesuit school’s RIAA p2p ‘filter’, p2pnet, June 28, 2004
EDUCAUSE – Pacific Lutheran U RIAA warning, p2pnet, Sep[tember 24, 2004
September 29th, 2004 at 10:12 pm
It’s absolutely amazing what the music and film people can get away with in America.
The trouble is, they eventually try it on here as well, and in other parts of Europe, and they usually succeed no matter how much public outcry there is.