Weekend Update
In the Saturday Gazette-Mail (Charleston, West Virginia), Tom Searls has a nice recap on Camden-Clark Memorial Hospital's appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeals from a $6.5 million verdict in a medical malpractice trial. I wrote yesterday that the Court rejected the petition by a vote of 3-2.
Also in the paper is an article on Marshall University's decision to start disciplining students who are accused of downloading songs illegally. Marshall's decision was apparently prompted by the lawsuits filed by some record companies against two students, which I wrote about earlier today. Although 20 Marshall students received pre-litigation settlement letters from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in February, and nine more received them last month, Marshall had not previously taken any disciplinary action. According to Stephen Hensley, the dean of student affairs, who is quoted in the article, the students' use of Marshall's network to download and/or distribute the songs violates the university's code of conduct and carries the risk of disciplinary action.
Marshall needs to be careful in how it proceeds. It has an interest in upholding its code of conduct and giving students a disincentive from engaging in similar conduct, but it cannot and should not rely solely on the RIAA's allegations against a student as the basis for any disciplinary action. As noted in a 2005 post in the blog, Ars Technica,
Also in the paper is an article on Marshall University's decision to start disciplining students who are accused of downloading songs illegally. Marshall's decision was apparently prompted by the lawsuits filed by some record companies against two students, which I wrote about earlier today. Although 20 Marshall students received pre-litigation settlement letters from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in February, and nine more received them last month, Marshall had not previously taken any disciplinary action. According to Stephen Hensley, the dean of student affairs, who is quoted in the article, the students' use of Marshall's network to download and/or distribute the songs violates the university's code of conduct and carries the risk of disciplinary action.
Marshall needs to be careful in how it proceeds. It has an interest in upholding its code of conduct and giving students a disincentive from engaging in similar conduct, but it cannot and should not rely solely on the RIAA's allegations against a student as the basis for any disciplinary action. As noted in a 2005 post in the blog, Ars Technica,
But the RIAA has been wrong before, as it was in its 2003 suit against Sarah Seabury Ward, a sixty-something sculptor who was accused of downloading gangsta rap. The suit was eventually withdrawn, but the case (and others like it, including one against a dead grandmother) does shed some doubt on the RIAA's ability to correctly identify the infringing party. With Santangelo's case now headed for trial, a judge's ruling may provide more clarity about what the RIAA can and cannot do in its war on musical piracy.There is also an equal protection issue. It isn't clear from the Gazette-Mail article whether Marshall is going to discipline only the two students who have been sued or the nine who received the RIAA's pre-litigation settlement letters. But if it's going to act against the nine who received the letters last month, what's it going to do about the 20 students who received the letters in February? Dean Hensley's explanation that, "We were new at it then, and we're not so new at it now," isn't very reassuring.
