The New Freedom

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Stanford University, once home to Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig, has just changed it’s campus network policy to actively report all DMCA infringements to the copyright overlords.

According to my friend George, a Stanford freshman: dude. shit is fffffucked up at stanford

This article from the Stanford Daily covers today’s story.

This drastic change now requires the university to flag and report each individual download spotted on the network. An ITSS spokesperson explained, “This isn’t the usual risk associated with illegal downloading. If you download 100 songs, 100 complaints will likely be forwarded to the RIAA. This is consistent with students’ user agreements, and we strongly urge everybody to take this news very seriously.”

Administrators have hailed the changes as an important first step toward Stanford becoming in copyright enforcement among universities. Provost John Etchemendy said, “Stanford is a world leader in intellectual property law, and we are proud to be the first institution to proactively defend copyrights and protect creative freedom. Many students, understandably, will oppose such a policy, but it’s not about what’s fair; it’s about what’s right.”

Already, 78 unnamed students have been reported in just the first day under the new rules, with that number expected to dramatically increase in the coming days.

Without any warning, Stanford has turned 78 of it’s students to potential financial bankruptcy in the first day of this new program alone.

Their new website for the project states, quite terrifyingly,

The Stanford Copyright Integrity Initiative has been introduced by Stanford University to demonstrate the university’s leadership in efforts to strengthen the integrity of copyrights and intellectual property. The Stanford University Information Technology Services user agreement reserves the right of the university to monitor illegal copyright and media violations in all traffic on its network. In a bold response to the growing deterioration of copyrights at national universities, Stanford has decided to report all DMCA-violating traffic directly to the proper authorities (RIAA, MPAA, ESA) as part of Stanford’s ongoing leadership in Silicon Valley and in the domain of intellectual property law online.”

I’ve said it before I will say it again, fuck California. It is no wonder that California, home of Hollywood Howard Berman, would introduce this bullshit ageist policy. Napalm the whole state.

(Also, it’s a prank. Type your name into the box on http://riaa.stanford.edu/ and you’ll notice you’ve been betrayed to the RIAA! Apparently the Stanford Daily is running a joke issue. And this is the only article from that issue they have online, the others are more obvious and in print. And my friend/I didn’t get the joke until I’d written half of this already. Good larf though!)

I got interviewed for a piece about file sharing on America.gov, the State Department’s hard-hitting investigative media outlet. It’s a really shitty piece that I don’t really want to talk about. I wanted to talk about the cultural/governmental implications of the RIAA’s actions, but it doesn’t cover any of that, only things which you all already know. Also, I am bitter because they asked me for a picture to use and I sent them one of me holding a big gun, which they did not use. Instead, they use one of my friend Paul looking rather dopey. Ah well.

R

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