"Protect Harvard from the RIAA"

Filed in archive Commentary , People , RIAA, IFPI , Society & Public Policy on May 3, 2007

RIAA continues its campaign to co-opt universities in curtailing alleged copyright infringement by its students with mixed success. Harvard staff and alumni Wendy Seltzer and Charles Nesson from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society put the brakes on RIAA's effort in an opinion piece published in The Crimson, the university newspaper.

In "Protect Harvard from the RIAA" they write that the university should be supporting its students, not RIAA, an outside and abusive organization.

"But mere understanding is no reason for a university to voluntarily assist the RIAA with its threatening and abusive tactics. Instead, we should be assisting our students both by explaining the law and by resisting the subpoenas that the RIAA serves upon us. We should be deploying our clinical legal student training programs to defend our targeted students. We should be lobbying Congress for a roll back of the draconian copyright law that the copyright industry has forced upon us. Intellectual property can be efficient when its boundaries are relatively self-evident.

But when copyright protection starts requiring the cooperation of uninvolved parties, at the cost of both financial and mission harm, those external costs outweigh its benefits. We need not condone infringement to conclude that 19th- and 20th-century copyright law is poorly suited to promote 21st-century knowledge. The old copyright-business models are inefficient ways to give artists incentives in the new digital environment."