Congress, College, and Copyright

According to Inside Higher Education,
"A bipartisan group of House of Representatives lawmakers said Wednesday (May 2)that they had written the presidents of 19 colleges and universities asking their officials to complete an expansive survey on the use of their campus networks for illegal downloading of copyrighted music, video or other digital content. "

19 universities were asked to document the extent of the illegal downloading problem on their networks, what they were doing to curtail the "theft" of copyrighted materials, and interestingly, what they were doing to promote “legitimate services as alternative sources for copyrighted materials.”

That is, the higher education institutions are being pressed not only to stop file sharing but aggressively to market i-tunes and similar commercial services to their students.

File sharing may violate legitimate copyright protections. But the serious theft has been perpetrated not by college students but by the congress, paid off by media giants, and with a wink and a nod from the supreme court.

The purpose of copyright is to provide some monopoly protection for writers and artists, for a short time, in order to provide a monetary incentive to create works of interest and value to the public. The entire point is to create a steady stream of such goods that will soon enter the public domain.

But the current law puts creative products into the hands of media conglomerates more or less in perpetuity. No one living can expect these goods to enter the public domain in their life times. Hence it is quite reasonable for them to regard the current copyright law as illegitimate. It is a small step from that for them to justify downloading of recent creative products, in violation of what anyone on reflection would consider to be a legitimate legal constraint.

My question is whether the universities, which in the emerging academic capitalist paradigm are themselves beneficiaries of these distorted copyright provisions, will simply fall in line to this congressional pressure or stake out a sensible position on a copyright regime that their students are willing to respect and that they are willing to police?