Those who engage in copyright infringement and the businesses that profit from it must be held legally responsible for their actions, Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) director of legal affairs Dean Garfield '95 said during a debate on file-sharing Friday afternoon.
Speaking to an often passionate and opinionated audience in the Friend Center, Garfield said that students need to become better educated about the consequences of illegally swapping music and movie files.
"Just because you can do it in your dorm room without anyone seeing what you're doing, doesn't mean that it isn't wrong, that it isn't illegal, and that it doesn't have an impact," he said.
The debate, entitled "Fear-to-Peer: A Debate About File-sharing on Campus," was moderated by computer science professor Edward Felten. It pitted Garfield against Wendy Seltzer, an intellectual property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Suing college students for illegal file-sharing does not make sense in the long term, Seltzer said.
"While it may be within [the MPAA's] rights to sue individual infringers, there are better ways of doing business," she said. "That's just not what makes sense in the long term. Prohibition only lasts so long."
The MPAA recently sent a letter to President Tilghman expressing concern about illegal movie downloading on the University network. The industry also announced in mid-April that it would bring copyright infringement lawsuits against students at 12 universities nationwide.
Garfield said that suing college students is not the ideal situation, but that copyright infringers need to be held accountable.
"At some point, you have to preserve and protect the rights you have. A part of this is changing people's attitudes and changing people's behavior," he said, adding that the MPAA and RIAA lawsuits were likely the reason the debate was taking place.
The discussion also touched on the idea of technological freedom.
Copyright protection is important and artists should be compensated for their creative work, but innovation should not come under assault, Seltzer said.
"We've seen disruptive technology before," she said, listing the automatic piano, radio and VCR as examples, "and in each case we didn't kill off the technology, we found compromises."
"Instead of killing off that new technology, let's find ways for people to pay for it," she added.
The entertainment industry has not attempted to stymie technological innovation, Garfield said.
"P2p [peer-to-peer technology] is and will be," he said. "The goal here by the motion picture industry and other studios is not to destroy p2p, but to embrace it. Technology is not the enemy."
Recent innovations in filtering and monitoring illegal file-sharing have also given universities the responsibility to better control their networks, he said.
"I think there is a duty to do what the institutions can to make sure its students are not engaging in illegal conduct," Garfield said.
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