My wife, an attorney, always reminds me that you want to “sue” big companies because they have money, and you want to press criminal charges against individuals because they will feel the real pain.
To do otherwise would seem futile. The only way to make a corporation hurt is to take away its money. Individuals, on the other hand, value their freedom above all else.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has struggled with this truism when it comes to schools and illegal file sharing. Who should they go after — the schools or the students?
Last spring, as executives from the music business were looking at declining record sales, the RIAA started putting pressure on colleges and universities to take responsibility for their students. Letters were sent out as a first step towards what many thought could be an intense siege on academic policies. In those letters, the RIAA urged college administrators to:
- Inform their students of their legal and moral obligations
- Specify what practices are and are not acceptable on the college’s network
- Monitor compliance
- Impose effective remedies against violators
Having sat in on administrative meetings at our university as an IT representative, I can assure you that these letters were taken seriously. To their credit, most institutions have cooperated as completely as possible with the RIAA, if not for legal reasons at least for pragmatic ones. File sharing eats up precious network bandwidth that the rest of the community needs for education
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After intensifying its pressure over the rest of last year, the RIAA decided to make its attack more personal by targeting individual students. This means that the RIAA has effectively circled the wagons to surround all offenders — companies like KaZaA who make software that allows illegal file sharing, educational institutions that have large open networks that become breeding grounds for illegal sharing, and students at those institutions who seem to be some of the worst offenders.
All of this is of central importance for educators because we are both the champions of free speech and of intellectual property. We are committed to raising the awareness of our students and, at the same time, forced to find materials and productive tools as budgets are slashed.
These conflicting, and often paradoxical forces, are not too different from the students who say that they want to listen to all of their favorite music but they can’t afford it. Doesn’t that justify a bit of piracy?
It is the same attitude teachers (at least in my 2+ decades of service) have demonstrated about resources. They need resources to teach with but those resources are too expensive. Doesn’t that justify illegal (i.e. violation of copyright) copying and sharing? After all, this is different. It’s for educational purposes.
The solution, however, is more than just agreeing to stop That’s a good place to start and it’s the right thing to do. But there are other steps that must be taken. Teachers, after all, really do need resources and budgets really are shrinking.
The first, and most important step, is building open source libraries of materials where educators (and students) can share resources with integrity and positive results. MERLOT is a fine example of this type of community. The University of Calgary Campus Alberta Repository of Educational Objects (http://careo.ucalgary.ca) has also assembled a repository of content that is open to anyone who wishes to join them. They have also established alliances with MERLOT, Netera Alliance (www.netera.ca), Alberta Learning (www.learning. gov.ab.ca), the Belle Project (www.netera.ca/belle/), and CanCore Protocol (www.cancore.ca). Instead of misappropriating resources form publishers or other teachers, educators can swap files here with the blessings of the authors and with relative ease.
The key to building open source resource deposits, ultimately, is for each of us to realize that doing so is actually part of our professional obligation. Teaching and education are about community. While we have responsibilities regarding out students, we also have accountability to our colleagues and to the larger educational community. As we have learned form Merlot, if we build these repositories, people will come and they will use them.
The proper response to the RIIA, by institutions or individuals, is not to hide behind the technicalities of copyright laws or the moral indignance associated with greater need. The real answer to our need for resources is to create them, to share them, and to encourage others to do the same.
Footnotes
The president of Michigan Technological University has responded to the RIAA suit against one of his students, accusing the RIAA of encouraging cooperation with universities but then bypassing those procedures with the current suit. Curtis Tompkins says, “I am very disappointed that the RIAA decided to take this action in this manner. As a fully cooperating site, we would have expected the courtesy of being notified early and allowing us to take action following established procedures, instead of allowing it to get to the point of lawsuits and publicity.”
USA Today reports that many students are not cowed by the RIAA’s actions. Students interviewed for the article say there is no way the RIAA can stop file sharing. Many, in fact do not see it as theft.
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I think that some professors see this kind of initiative as a threat. The professor that writes his own text book, work book, and “study supplements” doesn’t want an open exchange of materials. I’ve had a college professor that wrote the workbook so the pages could be torn out, so you couldn’t return them to the book store (he freeely admitted profit was a partial motivation).