Home » Public » This Week in LIS - 19 June 2009

This Week in LIS - 19 June 2009

19 June 2009 - 4:08pm — bartch02

Headline of the Week: Talking About Something New … Copyright

3020966666_f187384ff1_o.pngThis week, Luther completed our four-day registration event (ROAD) which brings our incoming first-year students to campus for a day of meetings, orientation, and the opportunity to register for courses for the fall. For the past couple years, LIS has offered a session covering the basics of technology and many of the frequently asked questions that new students and their families have. During the session we now include a section covering network use policies, file sharing, copyright, electronic harassment, etc. As LIS is spending more and more time on these issues, we try to use this opportunity to provide some advice to incoming students and their parents.

A few statistics:

  • In 2007-08, Luther received 32 claims of copyright infringement made against 20 of our students.
  • In 2008-09, Luther received 197 claims of copyright infringement made against 131 of our students. Additionally 22 students had their network access suspended during the academic year.

While such statistics might call into question the success of our educational efforts, several additional factors converged this past year that likely contributed to our uptick in claimed infringement notices.

  • We know the RIAA and others are targeting higher educational institutions in an effort to curb file sharing on campuses.
  • We changed how we shape our network traffic to be truly neutral. This made file sharing technically easier and less painful.

I don’t think this represents any increase in the number of our students who actually share files … just an increase in the number who receive complaints. As students are notified of the complaints against them, it has been interesting to note their responses. About two-thirds of students acknowledge they are file sharing and reply that they will cease (sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t). Much of the remaining third have no clear understanding how they are sharing files, either because they don’t understand the file sharing programs they use for music, or they think they have purchased software that includes the license to download content. This is a troublingly high percentage in my mind, especially given the news yesterday of the retrial of the Jammie Thomas copyright case in Duluth. In her original trial brought by the RIAA, she was found liable for sharing files with a total judgment against her of $222,000. Her retrial, undertaken after the judge granted a mistrial in the original case has now resulted in a $1.9 million judgment against her ($80,000 per song for 24 songs).

The RIAA has sent conflicting signals on the future of their legal initiatives, though this development will not cause them to regret prosecutions such as this. It also helps establish precedent for future legal action.

Taking the 197 items claimed against our Luther students this year and multiplying it by $80,000 per item leaves a potential legal liability of more than $15 million. That’s a pretty scary figure no matter how you look at it, and certainly not proportional to the actual damage done. We will need to continue to find ways to convey the risks undertaken by our students when engaging in file sharing, as we see a significant percentage very uneducated about what they are actually doing and the risks they are taking.

LIS Blog Highlights from the Week

The following articles are sampled from those available on the LIS Blog:

Notes from LIS Council

LIS Council did not meet this week.

NITLE Opportunities

As a member of NITLE (National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education), Luther has the opportunity to participate in a wide variety of developmental and training programs intended for faculty, librarians, and information technologists. Events listed at the link below are currently open for registration by Luther participants. LIS Staff who are interested in participating in an event should speak with Christopher Barth. Faculty who are interested in participating should speak with Lori Stanley. Participation is contingent upon available funding and program acceptance.

A full list of events (sortable by registration deadline) is available at http://www.nitle.org/www/events.

Next Week in LIS and Faculty Development Opportunities

Click on the event below for specific information and for a link to register. More information on training and development events is available.

Notable Internet Resource of the Week: Wordnik

Wordnik is an “evolved and webified” dictionary that actually doesn’t really like to call itself a dictionary. It is a site for words, definitions, pronunciations, related words, word uses, pictures, statistics, and other information about English words. It’s also possible to contribute content to the site. There are some fun trivia bits too, like recent uses on Twitter, and even the Scrabble score for individual words. If you’re a wordnut … maybe now you’ll be a wordnik …

On the web at http://www.wordnik.com/

Around the Web

Here are a few links to interesting developments over the past week:

  • Data Security and Privacy

Want to follow these updates during the week? or via RSS? Point your browser to Infoneer.net.

This Week in LIS is published most Fridays by Christopher Barth, Executive Director of Library and Information Services at Luther College for the Luther College community as well as those interested in information services and higher education.

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