Reason Magazine - Staff

Policing the Academy for Pirates

info@reason.com (Crispin Sartwell) — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 12:04:00 EDT

Last month, the U.S. Senate passed legislation enlisting colleges in the effort to police peer-to-peer networks and file-sharing, in order to prevent "piracy" by students of music, movies, and for that matter, books.

One might wonder exactly why Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid—who introduced the amendment to the Higher Education Reauthorization Act, then tempered it when there was an outcry from college administrators—is concerned about campus file sharing, other than a general commitment to fight crime. A cynic might suggest the entertainment industry's considerable patronage of the Democratic Party.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Reid's measure "called on the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America to draft annual lists of the 25 colleges receiving the most notices of copyright infringement. Those colleges would face a choice: Either use technological tools to block peer-to-peer file sharing, or risk forfeiting federal student aid.

In other words, colleges would be put under the supervision of the RIAA and MPAA. You need not wonder who lobbied for this extraordinary corporate authority over funding for American higher education. The punitive portions of the amendment were withdrawn after college officials reacted with outrage; what remained was a mere an exhortation for college administrators to act as entertainment police, and to explain to Congress and the entertainment industry what steps they're taking to combat piracy.

According to the Chronicle, the American Association of Universities learned of the new law just days before it was to be voted on. Were I the AAU, I'd be watching every piece of legislation to come through Congress from now on. It wouldn't be surprising ot see similar or identical measures slipped into various bills in the future.

Reid's amendment is a clear illustration of the effectiveness of lobbying. It wouldn't be unreasonable to think the trade groups actually wrote the text of the law. It vests in these groups a vast amount of money—taxpayer money—and, hence, power. The industry has already managed to move into a quasi-policing role, frequently working with federal, state, and local authorities on copyright and conspiracy investigations.

The bill also follows a continuing, troubling pattern of Congress deputizing and forcing corporations (money laundering laws, for example) and other private entities to monitor their customers for law-breaking, and to absorb the costs of compliance (the latest example is the Unlawful Internet Gambling Act, which deputizes ISPs and private banks to prevent customers from patronizing gambling sites).

But this is a particularly egregious case because it enforces rules that are specifically inimical to education, and that run contrary the fundamental mission of a college or university—the sharing of information. The reasons colleges have given for not wanting this sort of regulation are that it would be costly and outside their purview or expertise, and that it would be burdensome and likely ineffective. Of course, they insist, to a man or woman they oppose piracy.

Of course. But perhaps this move by Reid will at least get college administrators reevaluating the whole notion of piracy, and about the role or function of copyright plays in the educational mission of their institutions. Offhand, it seems odd that an educational institution would oppose the disseminating or sharing information—that, and not football, dorm life, or counseling services, would seem to be the irreplaceable essence of education. Isn't the exchange of ideas and information the business of colleges and universities?

One would think that higher education administrators would prefer information be more liquid than coagulated and monopolized. Even films and music contain important information subject to pedagogy and academic research. The fact that copyrighted textbooks can cost $100 a pop represents is not just the unfortunate result of a property claim to information, for example, but is a concrete barrier to the actual flow of information. Google's idea of putting massive academic libraries online for free—a project from which they've retreated bit by bit because of pressure from publishers and other copyright-holders—would in theory be a huge boon to the business of education, the dream of a John Milton or a Samuel Johnson.

Rather than enforcing anti-sharing rules, colleges ought to be fighting the expansion of copyright law, and investing in and exploring filesharing software and sites. Much of the content that an institution of higher education provides is also already available on the Internet, and colleges would be better off getting into the business of sorting it, evaluating it, disseminating it, and re-presenting it—the sort of thing their expertise is good for.

That Harry Reid is doing the bidding of the entertainment industry isn't surprising. But the very essence of a university ought to place it in fierce opposition to demands that it police its students for the excessive sharing of information. On the contrary, colleges and universities ought to be working toward an environment in which information can be shared with more freedom.

Why Big Things Fail

info@reason.com (Crispin Sartwell) — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 11:01:00 EDT

Evolution has produced some pretty large animals, and it seems offhand that very large organisms would have evolutionary advantages: they are intimidating and hard to kill because their organs are a long way from their skins. But there are upper limits to the size of animals on earth, and it's hard not to notice that the very biggest animals—mammoths, elephants whales, rhinoceri—are extinct or likely endangered. And obviously, very large organisms are at all times vastly more rare than very small ones.

A 2000 academic paper from a Swiss zoologist summarizes the reasons that this should be so: with increasing size come "viability costs...due to predation, parasitism, or starvation because of reduced agility, increased detectability, higher energy requirements, heat stress, and/or intrinsic costs of reproduction." For precisely these reasons, a state with trillion-dollar budgets and massive military might is in a precarious condition, and a good candidate for extinction.

Consider the military posture of the United States government.

American Iraq policy has been characterized by sluggishness. Think of it as the time it takes for a message to get from the extremities to the central nervous system and then for the response to return to the limb. While Rumsfeld and company spent years hemming and hawing over whether there was an insurgency or a civil war going on, the situation on the ground continued to change, radically, day by day. It took months to decide to send in 20,000 more troops, and during those months the situation was entirely transformed.

The supply chain is impossibly vast: you've got to keep the billions rolling in, and then distribute them; the energy requirements and heat stress are not ultimately sustainable; every increase in size beyond a certain point corresponds to a decrease in viability. Committees put up benchmarks and will now spend months evaluating whether the surge was effective. It takes years or perhaps decades to even realize if the war has been lost.

You can still be successful if you're fighting another behemoth military. But an al-Qaeda cell is autonomous, nimble, flexible, and completely committed. It responds instantly to a threat, and plans and prosecutes an attack in a matter of hours. If it attacks an American military target, it attacks an opponent without the ability to respond in kind, to say the least. The target sits there, subject to predation, parasitism, or starvation because of reduced agility. Astonishingly enough, the larger and more powerful a military establishment, the more vulnerable it is, and any band of brigands armed with slingshots can outwit the Pentagon, like stinging flies on an elephant.

That is a lesson that Alexander the Great and the Soviet Union learned in Afghanistan, that the Romans learned at the hands of Visigoths and Huns, that the United States learned in Vietnam and on 9.11. Once you get hold of a plane, it's hard to miss the World Trade Center, which is the proverbial broad side of a barn: each increase in size entails increased detectability, and increased vulnerability. As the old axiom goes, a terrorist can effect terror by succeeding in only a fraction of his attempts. The country fighting terrorism needs to be perfect.

Or consider, for example, border enforcement. You can build fences and send troops: spend a few years making a plan and another few implementing it. But so long as there's demand for their labor, the immigrants are perfectly flexible: they will find and exploit whatever holes you leave, and it will take years to plug each of them, by which time they'll have found a thousand new ones. Each immigrant is a nimble center of decision-making: in the long run, they'll always outwit a bureaucracy. Same goes for the drug war. No overarching act of Congress will ever effectively quell the small, creative, profit-driven moxie of an individual drug supplier.

It's hard to miss the irony of our gigantism. We started out by outmaneuvering the British—not hard considering that the decision-making power was impossibly remote from the action, that the British forces were governed by a set of rules and conventions that inhibited their flexibility, and that, already, British forces were engaged all over the world.

The group of agrarian republics envisioned by a Jefferson or a John Taylor was designed to create local centers of decision, a group of agile, loosely-associated organisms responding to local conditions. The tragedy of America is the story of how it mutated into an empire, both internally and externally, and hence outgrew viability.

A brontosaurus no doubt means well, but its tiny confused brain is radically inadequate to govern its astonishing body. It tramples everything until it finally runs out of vegetation or collapses under its own weight. Here's hoping the United States government returns to the decentralized principles of its founding, lest it go the way of the dinosaur.

Crispin Sartwell teaches political science at Dickinson College.

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