i think that filesharing has to be a kind of bottom-line issue for any libertarian/anarchist/fan of actual democracy or freedom. so check this and this and this:
Barney and Harry Reid
By Crispin Sartwell
The Senate recently passed legislation enlisting colleges by law in the effort to police p2p networks and file-sharing, to prevent "piracy" by their students of music, movies, and for that matter, books.
Now one might wonder exactly why Harry Reid, who introduced the amendment, then tempered it when there was an outcry from college administrators, is concerned about campus filesharing. To find out, you might consider the patronage of the Democratic party by the entertainment industry.
According to The Chronicle of Education, Reid's measure "called on the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America to draft annual lists of the 25 colleges receiving the most notices of copyright infringement. Those colleges would face a choice: Either use technological tools to block peer-to-peer file sharing, or risk forfeiting federal student aid."
The punitive portions of the amendment were withdrawn after college officials reacted with outrage, though it is likely that similar measures will be slipped into various bills in the future. One might wonder how in the world or why in the world Reid or these trade organizations believe that colleges should be in the business of enforcing the copyrights of Hollywood studios.
The reasons given by the institutions for not wanting this sort of regulation are that it would be costly and outside their purview or expertise, burdensome and likely ineffective.
True. But I hope that this has got college administrators quietly wondering about the whole notion of piracy, and about the role or function of copyright in relation to the educational mission of their institutions.
Offhand, it would seem odd for an educational institution to oppose disseminating or sharing information; that, and not football, dorm life, or counseling services, would seem to be the irreplaceable essence of education, its business end, if you see what I mean.
From what we might call a purely educational point of view, it is obviously vastly preferable for information to be perfectly liquid than coagulated or knotted or monopolized. Even films and music contain important information and are the subjects of pedagogy and academic research.
That textbooks can cost $100 a pop represents not just the unfortunate result of a property claim to information, but a concrete barrier to education.
Google's idea of putting whole gigantic academic libraries online for free - a project from which they've retreated bit by bit because of pressure from publishers and other copyright-holders - would obviously be entirely desirable from the point of view of education: it's the wet dream of a Milton or a Dr. Johnson. The function of copyright with regard to this project is merely to present a barrier; in the age when all forms of communication can be digitalized, copyright might have certain functions, but for research and teaching, the functions of a university, it is merely a problem, literally a cost.
In scientific research, there may be a phase of competition during which you don't want other practitioners working along your lines; you want to publish first; you don't give the information away, and when you are finished it is to some extent owned: by yourself or by your institution or funding agencies. But this phase, though perhaps unavoidable, is all things considered unfortunate, and if the various labs were co-operating they would be likely to make faster progress. And if, at the end of this process, you refuse to share your detailed procedures, or patent and manufacture the only equipment that can reproduce your experiments, then you've turned from science to an authoritarian model of knowledge.
Rather than enforcing anti-sharing rules, colleges ought to be investing in and exploring the potentials involved in filesharing software and sites. Much of the content that an institution of higher education provides is also already available on the internet, and colleges had better get about the business of sorting it, evaluating it, a re-presenting it, the sort of thing their expertise is good for.
In the immortal words of Barney, sharing is caring.
chronicle piece (subscription)
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