Why Is The Hollywood Tail Wagging The Dog Of Academia?
from the that-seems-backwards dept
Hollywood's admission last week that its campus piracy stats were bogus raises an interesting question: why have colleges been so quick to roll over and accede to Hollywood's demands? Greg Sandoval points out that universities could have done their own studies a long time ago and had hard numbers to dispute the industry's accusations. If, as now appears to be the case, colleges are only responsible for a fairly small fraction of illegal file sharing, it makes the industry's demands that academia bend over backwards to help Hollywood in its anti-piracy fight a little unreasonable. The really screwy thing about this is that the movie industry is a relatively small part of the American economy. The industry's revenues in 2006 were just $42 billion. For comparison, Harvard alone has an endowment of $35 billion, and altogether the higher education sector has assets in the hundreds of billions of dollars. If they chose to stand up to Hollywood's bullying techniques, they would have little trouble mounting an effective legal defense. And given that Hollywood seems determined to paint students—academia's customers—in the worst possible light, it seems only appropriate that colleges be more proactive about countering unfair negative stereotypes of college campuses.
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Filed Under: academia, movies, mpaa, piracy, students, studies
Companies: mpaa
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They could...
One has only to ask a the head of information services on a college campus how much bandwidth P2P sucks down.
I'd say it's another case of don't ask, don't tell.
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Seriously, who writes the paycheck then follow the money. Your money and MINE BTW....
Civil War NOW!
No TAXES for YOU!
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Re:
You do realize that government has gotten bigger than it ever was before under the current Republican administration don't you?
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works for me
So, sorry if this infringes on your happy, information-sharing eutopia, Mike. But, it works out better for most of us trying to work on the network.
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Re: works for me
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Re: Re: Re: works for me
Personally, I'd love to shake his hand. He's done a lot more than you know.
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Tim not implying
"If, as now appears to be the case, colleges are only responsible for a fairly small fraction of illegal file sharing, ..."
It seems that Tim is being unclear or being evasive to impute music downloading as well when this article is about strictly movie downloads. He should correct "illegal file sharing" to "illegal movie file sharing" to make his intent clearer.
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They don't care
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Lol'ing at representations of second tier academia
Go to U of C.
Go anywhere that isn't a second tier, struggling for students and endowment university.
They *do* tell hollywood to go take a flying leap.
It's about power, universities have no real reason to "band together," those that can afford to tell people to piss off do, those that can't, well just another reason for the best students not to go there.
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Re: Lol'ing at representations of second tier acad
There's an interesting culture being grown in tomorrow's leaders thru MBA and even some undergrad Business courses. Much of it is brought on by information sharing successes of companies like WalMart's RetailLink, courses that discuss Don Tapscott's book Wikinomics, and other successes.
Hindsight being 20/20, the lineage of this new economy could possibly have started from a single ad campaign thrusted forward by IBM in a commercial titled "Prodigy".
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The simple answer...
It's just simpler to block the traffic than handle all the complications. Higher ed IT departments are stretched pretty thin and have more pressing issues to deal with. They know that students trade in copyright material and do what they can to limit pirating and follow the law, but unless pressed by the RiAA and MPAA, IT really doesn't care.
Its hard enough keeping everything running...
E
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Endowment might as well = income at this level of
Source: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/08.23/99-endowment.html
Also, to the A/C for this sub-thread. Hiding the fact that you are a sock puppet for the RIAA... poor. buah ha ha ha
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