There’s been a lot of good discussion lately about more and more universities standing up to the RIAA and refusing to identify filesharing students and forward settlement letters. Eric Rehm from the University of Washington, in a letter to Vice-Provost Eric Godfrey, spells out some ways that universities are pushing back against RIAA pressure–fighting the RIAA by refusing to hand out the letters (University of Wisconsin), bill the RIAA for the cost it takes to process the notices (University of Nebraska), and tell the RIAA to “take a hike” (Harvard University).
Recently, it’s been brought to our attention that the University of Michigan (where I currently attend school) has just forwarded on a slew of letters to students concerning alleged p2p filesharing identified by the RIAA. While I praise the aforementioned universities for standing up to the RIAA, I respect the University of Michigan’s explanation in sending the letters. The university is trying to support the best interests of its students. By delivering the notices, the university can give students a bit of a legal head start by providing things like legal assistance. If the university does not send the letters, all bets are off as to whether the RIAA will settle. Students lose because they get named in lawsuits. The university looks like it withheld vital piece of information that could have students pain and suffering.
Most of the time, the question is not whether the RIAA will be able to match student names with university IP addresses. This can be done by university decision or subpoena. The question is how universities should support their students. The position held by the University of Michigan seems fairly fatalistic–”if we don’t tell you now, the RIAA will tell you later, except then, it will be much worse.” Universities need to try to better balance the process of informing and supporting students without being strong-armed by groups like the RIAA, who have been frequently targeting schools to hammer its zero-tolerance anti-piracy agenda. Universities should not be seen as a convenient mail delivery system. At the same time, let’s not feed students to the wolves by keeping them in the dark.
What a timely piece following Monday’s talk about open access and scholarly publishing. From Berkman Center fellow David Weinberger:
“Locking research up in for-pay journals slows the pace of knowledge. The peer review system — one important way ideas are vetted — does not require the existing print publication system. Harvard’s move will not only make more information more widely available, it may help nudge the system itself into a form that better serves our species’ interests: As more schools adopt open access programs, researchers will have an increasing disincentive not to lock their work up.”
Read his post here.
Today at the Michigan Union, copyright specialists Jessica Litman and Jack Bernard gave a talk entitled “Risks, Rights, and Responsibilities: Current Copyright Issues for Academics.” The talk was very interesting, and demonstrated the university and library commitment towards working to educate faculty about copyright. While university-level educators continue to sign restrictive licensing agreements with publishers, it’s important to support faculty in their aims to retain important intellectual rights.
At large research universities, tenure-track faculty are continually under the gun to publish, publish, publish. While there are increasingly more open access platforms to communicate research and scholarly articles, we still have a long way to go to in reducing the lock-in that traditional publishing gatekeepers have over the process. We want to continue to encourage faculty to publish, and it’s in the best interest of faculty and the university to support this. At the same time, we want to support the ever-growing community of scholars and teachers who see the benefits of opening up their work with the world–not keeping it locked within a publishing framework where content is resold to universities at extraordinary cost.
Perhaps department heads, tenure review boards, and the administration as a whole needs to review this peculiar incentive structure and begin to embrace new, more open modes of evaluation that can jump out of this deep, harmful publishing rut. Perhaps universities, especially public universities, need to leverage their political power with taxpayers in re-analyzing the logic behind paying once for research and then paying again for access to that same research.
