Well, piracy and stealing of copywrighted works continues to get thrown out there by folks as appropriate terms when talking about copyright infringement. I guess it goes to show if you have enough money, you really can frame the debate in your own terms. At least in the media. The ironic part is that even though they’ve forced wrong terminology down folks throats, nobody believes them anyway. Contrast this month’s Wired magazine cover story (link isn’t live yet, but whenever the most recent paper issue goes online, it should point to the right place) with the schelpy campusdownload.com.
Campusdownloading appears to be brought to us by Widmeyer Communications, a DC based PR firm, but it’s not hard to figure out who’s footing the bill. Just look at the list of legal downloading sites and see if you can find one non-RIAA backed site on there. I’m toying with the idea of emailing them and asking them how they chose that list and if they’d be willing to put some other legal downloading links on there. Say, magnatune.
Also — check out the video, which the site is encouraging Universities to distribute to their students. I’d love to know who this “Jake Roth” is that’s claiming that when he fixes “totally corrupted harddrives and the number one villian is illegal peer2peer sites that offer free music.”. Anybody want to find him and see if he really is a “computer repair expert”?