2008 Woodie Awards
Students put colleges in copyright war
Joel Currier ; St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Issue date: 4/27/05 Section: News
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The competing interests converged at a Digital Expo at Washington University, bringing together representatives from entertainment and technology with seven companies that market "peer-to-peer" file-sharing networks to colleges. The goal of the vendor fair and panel discussion Thursday night was to educate students about legal alternatives to trading copyrighted materials.
"I don't want to pay to download songs. If I really like something, I'll just buy the CD," said Scott Abrahams, 19, of Northbrook, Ill., a sophomore who estimated that he has collected thousands of digital music files on his computer--a playlist long enough to run for two weeks nonstop.
Students said the perception is that there's little risk of getting caught downloading copyrighted music and movies (they call it "ripping" or "burning") online. Some said they would be more willing to pay if their schools made it cheap and convenient.
"If (the university) were to sponsor something, I think it would make it more of an approachable option for us," said senior Jeffrey Dorr, 21, a senior pre-medical student from Miami.
That's what some schools, including Washington University and the University of Missouri at Columbia, are doing. They seek to weed out illegal sharing by arranging deals with a bevy of new digital wholesalers licensed to provide libraries of digital music and movies to colleges.
Recording and film industry representatives at Thursday's event said they embrace innovation and encourage technology companies to pursue legal alternatives to Internet piracy.
Technology has changed the entertainment business model by forcing it to cater to changing consumer demands for digital music, said Mark P. McKenna, a St. Louis University law professor representing the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco digital rights group.