The words in the title are not mine, although I agree with them. They are the words of the editorial board of the Southern Utah University Journal; the editorial is "Students Must Obey Copyright Laws." The editors make the obvious point, namely that students lead the way in terms of illegal downloads of movies, but they also note that it's likely some films being shown on the campus are unlicensed public performances. This is something to note — film presentations are always popular on college campuses, but (I'm dating myself here) when I went to them in college they were usually reel films on projectors. You can't download a reel or even buy it at Blockbuster; the process of acquiring it almost certainly involved a license. But now, you could pop a DVD into an auditorium's A/V system and put on a pretty good show.

I would suspect many students would take umbrage with the strong tone of this editorial (I took issue with the clumsy wording suggesting the reason for the DMCA was to "criminalize" copyright law breakers, a gross misrepresentation of the law). But there are reasons why it is illegal to download a movie from an unauthorized P2P network, and there are reasons why it is illegal to put on a public performance of a movie without authorization. The copyright owner has rights over the use of his work; that is the incentive that led the film to be produced to begin with. So by buying the DVD or getting permission to show the movie to three hundred college students, you are helping to continue the virtuous copyright cycle. I think most readers of this blog already know that, but the statistics would suggest many on college campuses do not.

The issue of copyright and universities is of course more complicated that this. That's why the Copyright Alliance is organizing an academic symposium on the topic on December 10th on the campus of The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Watch this blog for more information as we get closer.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 8:49 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright law, creators, p2p. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.