Digital copyright silliness on campus

EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann in an op-ed piece in the San Jose Mercury News the other day: Digital copyright silliness on campus. Excerpt:

What do Columbia, Vanderbilt, Duke and UCLA have in common? Apparently, leaders in Congress think they aren't expelling enough students for illegally swapping music and movies.

The House committees responsible for copyright and education wrote a joint letter May 1 scolding the presidents of 19 major American universities, demanding that each school respond to a six-page questionnaire detailing steps it has taken to curtail illegal music and movie file-sharing on campus. One of the questions - "Does your institution expel violating students?" - shows just how out-of-control the futile battle against campus downloading has become.

As universities are pressured to punish students and install expensive "filtering" technologies to monitor their computer networks, the entertainment industry has ramped up its student-shakedown campaign. The Recording Industry Association of America has targeted more than 1,600 individual students in the past four months, demanding that each pay $3,000 for file-sharing transgressions or face a federal lawsuit. In total, the music and movie industries have brought more than 20,000 federal lawsuits against individuals in the past three years. ...