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The Recording Industry Association of America has announced that it is abandoning its legal strategy of bringing large-scale lawsuits against students and others who download music from the internet.
The RIAA has been bringing such suits for more than five years, often targeting students who used college networks for file-sharing. According to one expert quoted in the Chronicle article, such suits sometimes forced students to drop out of college.
Steven L. Worona, the director of policy and networking programs at the education-policy group Educause, said the move demonstrated that the RIAA understands that “their sue-the-customer, scorched-earth business model has not worked.”
Links from the student protest at the New School:
The website and blog of “The New School In Exile,” organizers/participants in the recently ended sit-in and associated actions.
A roundup of media coverage of the protests.
The text of the agreement between the protesters and university president Bob Kerrey.
An essay by one of the protesters on the lessons he learned in the sit-in.
A clip from Brian Lehrer’s talk show on New York public radio, in which he talks with one of the protesters’ media liaisons.
A Flickr slideshow of the protest, and another set of photos. (Several other photosets are up at NYC Indymedia.)
New School president Bob Kerrey’s new blog.
I’ll be keeping an eye out for more resources and links. Feel free to pass additional ones along in comments.
About a week ago, this story made the rounds.
A professor at the University of Michigan answered an ad on craigslist for sexual services placed by a woman who turned out to be a U of M law student. In the course of the encounter that followed, he hit her with a belt and slapped her face. She went to the cops, he claimed it was all consensual. The cops refused to charge him with assault, instead charging them both with misdemeanor offenses relating to the transaction itself, and one local (non-campus) cop made an extremely offensive public comment ridiculing the woman who had been beaten for going to the police.
I didn’t post about the story at the time because I didn’t have much of an angle on it, and because it’s often hard to know what to make of a crime story when it first breaks. It wasn’t clear what action the university was taking, or planning to take, for instance.
But now the law student has spoken out, and her statement is very much worth reading. Here it is.
The Daily Princetonian‘s blog has a scan up of a 1958 pamphlet for alumni about admissions policies for their children, and it’s great reading.
Jan Kemp, an English professor at the University of Georgia who exposed exploitation of student athletes in the 1980s, leading to reforms in NCAA eligibility policies, has died of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Kemp was fired by UGA in the early 1980s for refusing to inflate the grades of varsity athletes who were in some cases functionally illiterate. When she sued the university for wrongful dismissal, the university’s academic policies were themselves put on trial.
In one of the most damning pieces of evidence, an audiotape was introduced on which the head of remedial studies at UGA could be heard telling fellow professors that student athletes were “a kind of raw material in the production of some goods to be sold as whatever product, and they get nothing in return.”
Kemp was reinstated as a result of that trial, and awarded more than one million dollars in damages. The verdict led to the resignation of the university’s president, and to new academic standards for athletes at UGA and in the NCAA as a whole.
studentactivism.net 
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