Law & Disorder / Civilization & Discontents

Tennessee legislation would turn schools into copyright cops

A new bill proposed in Tennessee would require universities to filter their …

A new bill proposed in the Tennessee state senate aims to reduce copyright infringement at universities by forcing the schools to become antipiracy enforcers. If passed, the bill would require universities that receive funding from the state to analyze all traffic passing through their networks in order to track down and stop infringing activity. Under the proposed bill, universities could lose state funding if they refuse to implement network analysis systems or if they receive ten or more infringement complaints from content owners during a single year.

The University of Tennessee is number four on the RIAA's list of top music piracy schools and number 19 on the MPAA's list of top movie piracy schools. The content industry has increasingly attempted to pressure universities into taking a more active role in squashing piracy and wants the government to step in and force the issue if universities aren't willing to comply. A controversial college funding bill that recently passed in the House also includes mandatory anti-piracy filtering requirements.

Many questions remain unanswered about the extent to which piracy occurs on college campuses. The MPAA recently retracted the outrageously inflated college piracy statistics that it published after a 2005 study. Despite the fact that the MPAA's numbers were egregiously inaccurate, the study has been repeatedly cited by lawmakers. As we have pointed out in the past, it isn't clear that every download necessarily constitutes a lost sale. If the raman stereotype is to be believed, the average college student doesn't exactly have a lot of extra money for buying movies.

Universities understandably complain about the high costs of acquiring and operating network analysis tools. In an attempt to make it easier for schools to shoulder the burden of antipiracy enforcement efforts, the MPAA created a toolkit last year that aimed to automate much of the process. The toolkit, however, was built using open source software and failed to comply with software's license. After the MPAA refused to take down the software and comply with copyright law, one of the developers sent a DMCA takedown notice to the organization's Internet service provider. The MPAA claimed that it would make the toolkit available again after resolving the copyright issues, but still hasn't done so.


The content industry fully admits that its own anti-piracy enforcement efforts have been extremely costly. These laws look like an attempt to shift some of those expenses away from the content industry and onto students and tax payers. Surely, university resources are better spent on education than on futile efforts to prevent file sharing and prop up outdated business models. Unfortunately, lawmakers don't seem to agree. Tennessee residents wishing to share their concerns with members of the Tennessee legislature can do so with contact information available on the legislative body's web site.

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