Copyright Advocate Slams Universities

The top copyright champion in the U.S. House of Representatives slammed top officials at many of the nation's universities April 16 for what he felt was their ineffective responses to campus peer-to-peer (P2P) piracy and told a group of 400 songwriters at an ASCAP event in Austin that Congress would deal with those committing Internet and hard-goods piracy.

Lamar Smith, R-Tex., the new chairman of the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property, came out of the gate swinging in his speech, following the same no-nonsense approach he took last year as the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism.

Smith said, "It doesn't matter whether the pirates are individuals or crime organizations, one thing is clear: Their activity is increasing, and it must be addressed."

Smith, who said he sees no difference between P2P downloading and stealing a CD from a record store, then asked, "Would any other American industry be able to sustain its operations for long if one-third of its sales were lost to theft?"

He told attendees, "The very first hearing I held in the [Intellectual Property] subcommittee was to address piracy on university campuses. At the hearing, it was evident that so far, very little has been done to enforce the law against students who illegally download using university resources."

The Congressman also commented on the April 3 lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Assn. of America (RIAA) against students at Princeton University in New Jersey; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.; and Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Mich. (Billboard, April 12). In the suits, the RIAA asked for permanent injunctions to shut down file-sharing systems operated on the computer networks at the schools. "So what did Princeton University administrators do?" Smith asked. "Nothing. Just like Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Michigan Technological University—and most other universities faced with this problem."

Although leaders from the university community have formed a committee with the content community to address the problem, Smith characterized the responses by universities to P2P piracy as "dismissive. It is, to say the least, disturbing when university officials have almost no regard for the theft of work many artists and songwriters take months and years to create."