Category Archives: Open access

The Chronicle News Blog: Music Industry Will Stop Mass Lawsuits Against Students Over Illegal Trading

In a major shift in strategy, the Recording Industry Association of America will cease suing groups of students for illegally sharing copyrighted music on college networks.

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Cnet News: RIAA win: Tennessee to police campus networks

Tennessee has agreed to filter computer networks for unauthorized music downloads at the state’s colleges and universities.

Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen signed into law a bill designed to thwart music piracy at the state’s campuses, the Recording Industry Association of America said on its Web site.

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The Chronicle: Colleges Express Concern About State Laws That Require Them to Fight Online Piracy

Higher-education officials say that the entertainment industry is pushing for state laws that would force colleges to police their networks for illegal trading of music and video files and to buy software to stem the problem.

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Boston Globe: Music downloaders win round in court

Boston University students have won what one lawyer hailed as a “David and Goliath” victory after challenging one of the recording industry’s most aggressive tactics: lawsuits targeting people who illegally download music.
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US District Judge Nancy Gertner ruled this week that the university cannot turn over the names of students to several major record companies that sued for the information until she can do a more in-depth review. The ruling, for the moment, quashes the companies’ efforts to hold the students liable for copyright infringement, which could have resulted in thousands of dollars in fines. Lawyers who supported the students said the decision would make it harder for record companies to win some 20,000 similar cases they have brought nationwide.

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The Chronicle: Some Anthropologists Continue the Slow Push Toward Open Access

When the American Anthropological Association announced in September that it would move its publishing apparatus from the University of California Press to Wiley-Blackwell, anthropology blogs and e-mail lists buzzed with discontent. Some advocates of open-access publishing complained that moving to a for-profit publisher seemed like a step backward. And the switch would almost certainly mean higher prices for libraries, they said, which might spark a decline in subscriptions.

“What good is the AAA to its members if its primary goal is survival, rather than the promotion and dissemination of our research?” asked Christopher M. Kelty, an assistant professor of anthropology at Rice University, on the group blog Savage Minds, when the deal was announced.

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Inside Higher Ed: Harvard Opts In to ‘Opt Out’ Plan

Harvard University’s arts and sciences faculty approved a plan on Tuesday that will post finished academic papers online free, unless scholars specifically decide to opt out of the open-access program. While other institutions have similar repositories for their faculty’s work, Harvard’s is unique for making online publication the default option.

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The New York Times: At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on Web

Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free.

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Newsday: Colleges to copyright electronic material

Hofstra University and two other colleges, in negotiations with the Association of American Publishers, agreed to treat electronic educational materials with the same copyright principles applied to printed work, according to the association.

The agreement last week makes Hofstra, Syracuse University and Marquette University among the first schools to establish standards in conjunction with the association for faculty and staff use of digital materials, said Allan Adler, vice president for legal and government affairs for the association.

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Inside Higher Ed: International Call for Open Resources

In 2002, a small group of foundation officials and technology experts released the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which called for journals to end subscription barriers to online content and for scholars to strive to make their research findings available online and free. While many publishers that charge for content have attacked these ideas, the Budapest manifesto played a key role in a movement that is seeing notable success. The new appropriations bill for the National Institutes of Health contains a provision — fought for several years by publishers but backed by many academics — that requires all studies financed by the NIH to be made available online and free.

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Inside Higher Ed: A Friendly Reminder

Could students possibly be making themselves vulnerable to lawsuits from the recording industry — without knowing it?

The University of Michigan thinks they might. And just to be sure, it rolled out a service last week that automatically informs students living in residence halls if they’re uploading files via peer-to-peer technology. The service, called BAYU (for Be Aware You’re Uploading), is being described by officials as an educational tool that keeps students aware of their online activity.

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The Chronicle: U. of Oregon Says No to John Doe

Add the University of Oregon to the small but growing list of institutions that are fighting the recording industry’s antipiracy lawsuits: The university is asking a federal judge to quash subpoenas seeking the names of 17 campus song-swapping suspects.

The Recording Industry Association of America asked Oregon officials to forward pre-litigation notices — which offer discounted rates for out-of-court settlements — to the students earlier this year. But the university declined, so the trade group went ahead and filed a “John Doe” subpoena that called on Oregon to name students identified only by Internet-protocol numbers.

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University of Oregon refusing to help ID music pirates

The Associated Press

EUGENE, Ore. — A lawsuit brought by the recording industry is pitting piracy against privacy.

Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers filed court papers this week seeking to free the University of Oregon from having to identify students who illegally downloaded music.

In August, a group of recording companies filed a lawsuit accusing 17 Oregon students of music piracy. The students are identified only by an Internet address, and industry lawyers have asked the university to identify the students.

Similar suits have been filed across the U.S., and universities and colleges have been cooperating. The University of Oregon has traced the file sharing to dorm rooms and users of a wireless network, but officials can’t be sure who shared the music without interviewing students and examining their private computers, The Oregonian newspaper reported.

University officials contend that would violate privacy rights.

“University (officials) feel like they are being asked to do the investigation on behalf of the company when it’s not really their role,” said Stephanie Soden, spokeswoman for the Oregon Department of Justice.

Since 2003, the music industry has taken legal action against more than 20,000 people suspected of using the Internet to make illegal copies of songs.

The Recording Industry Association of America could not be reached for comment after hours. But Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the association, told an Ohio University forum this week that the music business is “hemorrhaging” jobs and money and the lawsuits are a last resort.

Ray Beckerman, a New York copyright attorney, said Oregon is the first state he knows of that is seeking to protect the identity of students accused of piracy.

If so, it would be the second time in months that Oregon has been involved in a key lawsuit involving music piracy. A Beaverton woman filed a class-action lawsuit against the recording industry in August, accusing it of illegal spying and intimidation in its crackdown.

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Inside Higher Ed: Live From Ohio: Rock Stars and the RIAA

Ohio University played host on Tuesday to a panel that hit close to home as music experts, critics of and sympathizers to illegal downloading, and a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer discussed the finer points of peer-to-peer file sharing.

The debate is hardly theoretical at a campus that has received 100 pre-litigation letters this year from the Recording Industry Association of America as part of the group’s controversial tactic of forcing college administrators into a reluctant enforcer role against illegal downloading. Partially as a result, Ohio University announced an unusually strict policy of blocking all peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic earlier this year. To provide a legal alternative, the institution has since joined Ruckus, a subscription-based music service that is currently free to students.

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The Chronicle: Chemical Society Defends Its Opposition to Open Access

Officials of the American Chemical Society strongly dispute an anonymous e-mail message’s accusations that the assocition opposes open-access publishing because it wants to preserve the profitability of its journals and the bonuses that its top executives receive

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eSchool News: House bill reopens campus file-sharing battle

Two key members of the House Education and Labor Committee have rekindled Congressional efforts to make colleges use a technological approach to prevent so-called digital piracy of music and video files. Higher education leaders are, once again, up in arms.

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The New York Times: File-Sharing Students Fight Copyright Constraints

When Zachary McCune, a student at Brown, received an e-mail message from the university telling him he might have broken the law by downloading copyrighted songs, his eyes glazed over the warning and he quickly forgot about it. “I already knew what they’d say about file-sharing,” he said. “It’s become a campus cliché.”

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The Chronicle News Blog: Anti-Open-Access Effort by Publishing Group Loses Another University Press

Another top university press has registered its displeasure with Prism, a controversial anti-open-access lobbying effort undertaken by the Association of American Publishers. Ellen Faran, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, has resigned from the executive council of the association’s Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division. Even so, Ms. Faran told The Chronicle in an e-mail message, “The Prism Web site continues to give the incorrect impression that it has the unanimous support of the Executive Council.”

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