Why Stop At Universities?
The pressure on Universities to police their students file sharing activities is mounting. Now one congressman is suggesting that federal funding be withheld to Universities who don’t do enough to prevent copyright piracy of movies and music among their students. The Universities are only implicated because the provide network access to their students. Other than that, a university is a community of adults – almost all students are over the age of 18 – and the University should not be charged with any greater responsibility to police their campuses than they are for any other illegal activity. What about alcohol use on campus? Most students, particularly dormitory residents, are too young to legally drink or possess alcohol. How about cutting off federal funding to Universities that fail to stop students from bringing alcohol onto campus. It would not be enough to report and prosecute students who are found to have done so. Rather, the University would have to examine the shape of all backpacks and packages coming onto campus, and confiscate anything deemed too large or misshapen until the student could prove it did not contain alcohol. Or how about preventing assault and vandalism by requiring psychological assessments of all entering students, and refusing entry into the program to any person deemed to have disrespect for authority until they have undergone treatment and become docile and willing to blindly follow any directions.
There is so much more good we could do for society if we would just take advantage of all the places where our citizens are bunched up within the control of one centralized authority. Universities, banks, the drivers license bureau, insurance companies, churches, movie theaters, Wal-Mart - the list is really only as short as our imaginations. If we would just crack down more on our populace by restricting access to the neccessities of life then we could wipe out crime altogether, and probably increase the profits of our greatest national treasures at the same time - Big Corporations.
What a wonderful world that would be.
June 11th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
It all comes down to money … and business/lobbying wise, there is no profit to be made in stopping underage drinking. There is, however, money to be made in stopping file sharing. Sigh.
December 7th, 2007 at 10:42 am
[...] places? Anyway, the survey gives yet another reason to laugh out loud and then get outraged at the entertainment industy’s continued efforts to, well, frankly I’m not entirely sure what they’re trying to do. I think the big [...]
March 21st, 2008 at 7:50 am
Copyright laws in relation to printed material are an outdated joke….
Try finding the original author for permission of printed material….most of the time you won’t even be able to get into contact with the original publisher, let alone the author…..I’m not going to spend hundreds of hours beating my head up against an impenatrable wall of publishing houses….simply post the article in an unabridged form, state the original author, and it should all be OK….
Copyright exists to protect big business….every one else is confronted with a legal minefield….why should we bother? If the intention is to simply distribute the information and the source is qouted, nobody loses out in the end….I have already paid for my magazine, and the author has already been paid for publishing the article, so who really owns the words?….nobody….
Copyright in the print form is a crock….