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New York Times on Students for Free Culture

I don’t have enough time to make a post about the concert last night before my next class. My bandwidth also hasn’t been sufficient to get pictures up yet, so that’ll have to wait.

In the meantime, I wanted to throw out an article in the New York Times about students at Brown University getting hit with filesharing lawsuits by the RIAA. It has two great quotes in it. The first is by a Brown student accused of infringing copyright by filesharing:

“People wonder why college students aren’t rallying more around the Iraq war,” Mr. McCune said. “If there were a draft, we probably would be. Students are so quick to fight for this cause because we’re the ones bearing the burden.”

That’s sociologically pretty important, I should think. It’s a very functional thing: hurt students, piss off students. If you piss off the ones from well-educated, wealthy families, you’re going to have to put up with whatever resistance comes of it. I assume the RIAA was thinking that filing suit against rich kids would lead to faster and higher settlements, improving their bottom line on this whole litigation scare tactic they’ve been running for the past 5 or 10 years. It might not be as simple as that, though, as the next quote illustrates:

Cory Doctorow, co-editor of the popular technology blog Boing Boing, said the recording industry lawsuits were not “scaring students away from file-sharing, but scaring them into political consciousness.” Last year, Mr. Doctorow was an adviser to the Students for Free Culture chapter at the University of Southern California while teaching a course on the history of copyright law.

Read more

This is fact.

I must further point out that this article in itself is rather detrimental to the movement of Free Culture as popularized by Lessig, as have been many posts I’ve made myself. The FreeCulture.org community recently voted to change its tagline to “Students for Free Culture,” and I can’t say that I support this decision. My objections are best summed up by Crosbie Fitch’s post on FreeCulture.org’s listserv last week:

I would have thought “Artists for Free Culture” would have been better.

Or even “Free Citizens for Free Culture”

I would suspect that the popular conception of a student is a passive
receptacles for knowledge, only expected to start doing anything
significantly productive/creative until after they’ve ceased being a
student.

The last thing a passive receptacle needs is the freedom to publish copies
or derivatives. People will assume students are just after broader
educational exemptions for using the library photocopier.

So ‘Students for Free Culture’ comes across as if it was “Couch Potatoes for
Free Culture”.

At worst “Students can’t afford much, so we should get the world’s culture
free of charge. Thanks.”

The best light it can be put in is “Typically militant students having the
luxury of being able to agitate against cultural oppression of the masses”

What’s so special about a student?

Emphasis mine, of course. So was the RIAA wise to pick Brown students for lawsuits, or not? They might get settlements, sure, but will that pay off in the end? I honestly think that pissing off well-educated rich kids–and their families–isn’t the best way to maintain a solid revenue stream, but what do I know about business?