Copyrights and Copywrongs

In the intellectual sphere it is easy to get caught up in the fair use frenzy and forget about the need to adequately respect copyright law. I think we have all, at some point or another, taken an image for a presentation, or made copies of a paper without the express permission of the copyright holder and thought nothing of it, but even as the digital age marches on, it remains necessary that we respect and uphold the rights and privelidges guaranteed to copyright holders.

As I listened to the lecture in class about copyright law, it occurred to me that I had personally been guilty of more than one infraction on the law, and that realization helped to reinforce in my mind why copyright law is so important. But there was one issue above all of the others that really stood out to me, and that was the ferocity by which the RIAA seems to stalk the university setting.

On the one hand, it makes sense to me that the music industry should make every attempt to secure its assets in order to keep from being overrun by the wide-scale downloading epidemic that has broken the monopolistic hold it once had, but on the other hand it seems that targeting the academic sphere is more than a little unfair. As was brought up in class, only 4% of all music downloading comes from universities, yet a fair majority of high level takedowns have been against Trinity itself. This proverbial witch hunt only serves to make the RIAA look even more domineering and oppressive to the individual consumer and, in my opinion, encourages further illegal action.

But to the defense of the RIAA, it is much more difficult to monitor the individual actions of every person downloading in today's internet environment. A strict monitoring of the academic setting helps to ensure a successful prosecutorial run by the RIAA on every subpoena, and the university IP addresses are easier to track than those of individual pirates; not to mention, any suspected action instantly gives the RIAA the upper hand since it constitutes a violation of the university fair use policy.

Even with both sides of the argument considered, I would say I have to err on the side of the induvidual. It seems to me that the RIAA wants to overassert its authority by individually prosecuting file sharers and by focussing mostly on academic setting. Personally, I think that the real threat to the recording industry is not from file sharing in academia, but rather from the individuals who have become fed up with paying exhorbidant prices for music.

-Steve