Congressional Hearing on College Piracy

Professor Terry Fisher testified this past Tuesday before the Committee on Education and the Workforce Subcommittee on 21st Century Competitiveness in a hearing on The Internet and the College Campus: How the Entertainment Industry and Higher Education are Working to Combat Illegal Piracy.  In his testimony, Professor Fisher considered the continued prevalence of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks on many American campuses, despite the illegality of the unauthorized exchanges of copyrighted works conducted through the networks.

After laying out the considerations universities must take in combating the illegal campus downloading activities, and documenting the ways in which universities have begun to address them, Professor Fisher proposed the Digital Media Exchange (DMX), which emerged from the Digital Media Project, was first proposed in Promises to Keep and is in preliminary phases in a number of countries. According to Professor Fisher:

The gist of the system is that it would legally provide consumers unlimited online access to copyrighted recordings, unencumbered by encryption, while ensuring that the owners of the copyrights in those recordings were fully and fairly compensated…In each country in which the system were instituted, copyright owners (record companies, music publishers, film studios, etc.) would license a nonprofit private enterprise to distribute digital copies of their works. (The name of the enterprise would vary by country, but the name we have selected for Canada is Noank Media.) Noank Media would, in turn, enter into contracts with major access providers: Internet service providers (like Comcast or Verizon); mobile phone providers (like T-Mobile); and, last but not least, universities. Those contracts would oblige Noank Media to provide the customers, employees, and students served by the access providers unlimited downloading and streaming services. In return, each access provider would agree to pay Noank Media a certain amount each year for each of its customers, employees, or students.

You can read Professor Fisher’s full testimony here, learn more about the Digital Media Exchange here, and read articles about Tuesday’s hearings here and here.