Fred Von Lohman’s article in the Post chides a group of Congressmen for expecting universities to enforce copyright by fining or expelling students, or by installing filtering software. He urges instead that the university collect monies to pay the music industry for a blanket license for unlimited downloading, as they do for software. At least, it is not a compulsory license. And it seems to be a a reasonably practicable solution at one level.
(One practical problem: does the license transfer the rights in the sound recordings only? Or the rights of the composers and such as well? Licenses for music distribution are notoriously hard to obtain because of this fragmentation issue. Set it aside for now).
But note one key element on which the scheme relies–in order to have any incentive to negotiate for a license,
the universities and/or their students *must* be under some threat of liability. Withdraw that threat, declare downloading to be legal and legit, and the music studios lost their bargaining power. I am curious as to whether FVL would support this premise. He seems to be on the one hand objecting to the reasonableness of the threats, while supporting a solution that requires some kind of threat as a premise.
And then, of course, there is the question of price. How much, for a site license for downloading? Especially when the downloading and uploading that goes on in the university setting is, one suspects, the origin of much of the downloaded and uploaded material circulating among those who are not members of the university community. What does the continuation of this practice among universities do to the prospects for subscription and other for-profit music services? The universities have become unwitting competitors to those other services, and when pricing the license, it would not be unfair for music producers (or movie producers, or book publishers) to take this into account. But that means a price–and other terms–that universities might well be unwilling to pay. Including the installation of filters or the use of watermarks that keep the downloaded material within university community bounds.
And then there is the question of what the whole deal teaches students. Nothing about the impact of free-riding on the livelihoods of songwriters or authors, certainly. The impact can only be to legitimize the expectation of “free” content. Which then spreads to movies. And to books. And which continues throughout the student’s lives. In a world that desperately needs real competition and real markets in content and a basic understanding of the rules governing trade in intangibles as more and more of the value added in the economy comes from intellectual rather than physical capital, it is not a good start.
My take: the universities are communitarian enough. The crackdown on downloading students does sometimes seem futile or silly. But the question of who pays and how much is not, after all, a trivial one. It is the engine of the economy. So let’s keep working on it. No need to cut corners just yet.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.