copyright

So today I got my first introduction to the stupidity of intellectual property protection and more importantly to the fear that organizations have of being accused of violating these protections.

This is a frat boy and a legal post.

The greek community put together a 3 minute informational presentation about greek life that it uses at new student orientation sessions. This presentation is a series of words followed by a series of pictures and set to music.

The show is shown twice a week for three minutes, for educational purposes to new freshmen and is not solid or disseminated in ANY way. What happens? The University, afraid of copyright says that the song must be taken otu and replaced by one from its library.

Why does the University do this? Because last year they used protected music for the general orientation videos and got a talking to. The university audio-visual department, apparently unable to find a lawyer to talk to failed to distinguish between them.

Lets observe:

When the University was talked to, it was in reference to the fact that they sold the videos as a fundraiser. There is only one copy of our video and it certainly is not being sold. In addition, our video is for educational purposes. Third, our video is not in any way reproduced or disseminated.

IP laws serve a valuable role in society, I don't dispute that, but when used by uninformed people in positions in which they are supposed to know what they are doing, it causes more problems than it is worth. Shouldn't we be focusing on protecting patents in other countries and cracking down on the massive copying of computer software instead of worrying about what some college students do with a 20 year old song? Yes, yes we should.

I am reminded of an economic theory: IP laws are useful only to the point that the marginal cost of inforcing them is less than or equal to the marginal benefit. Clearly the cost here exists, we cannot use the song, we wasted our time, our product will not be as nice, however the benefits are non-existant: the band wrote the song 20 years ago....... they made their money.