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.
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?
And that’s exactly why there ISN’T a draft, even though our military is on its way to fulfilling the prescient slogan “Army of One.”
Institute a draft and war protests will rapidly end this war. Geez, doesn’t anyone remember anything about the ’60s?
Still, it’s impossible not to laugh (and weep) at the shallowness of the Brown student who, when caught doing something he knows perfectly well is illegal, says, see, this is why college students aren’t rallying more around the Iraq war. Ah, yes, he has much more important things to do (like file sharing) that protest against War, fer god’s sake. After all, it doesn’t affect him….
To be fair, I agree with his sentiment that the war doesn’t affect average Americans, and that includes students. We aren’t even allowed to see the coffins of soldiers, whether on TV or in print or whatever. The reason this war has gone on so long is that no one at home is feeling it.
I myself didn’t understand the worthlessness of the US Dollar until I came to live here for a year. I think the present administration to a great job sheltering the public from negative images, horribly exploiting the troops and reserves. Other than that, the American people by and large live exactly the same as they had before the war began.