Puff drops a million to his alma mater

Puff Daddy has given a million dollars to the University he went to:

Puff Daddy has donated $1 million to the Howard University in Washington D.C.

Mr Daddy was a business student at Howard, and nowadays he's nudging close to be worth a billion.

If you wanted to be cynical, you might notice that he dropped out of the university after two years. But if Howard have their wits about them, they'd be running "if you can become a billionaire with just two years with us, imagine how great you'd be if you graduated" ads.

Wiley: The value of a university education

When you're paying massive fees for your courses, you move from being a student to being a consumer. And that makes you demand more, as Wiley found out:

He tells Britain's Daily Star newspaper, "I don't like students' attitudes. They only really like indie (rock) bands, and why would I want to perform for people who are going: 'Shut up Wiley, you're s**t?' I did a gig at Surrey Uni recently that I hated.

"I didn't need that £12,000, so I cancelled the whole uni tour and now I won't play a university ever again."

Rather a lazy cliche that students are only interested in indie rock bands. They like all sorts of music, Wiley. You weren't fighting a genre block, you were struggling with a quality threshold.

Gordon in the morning: University challenge

The surprising thing is not that there's an academic conference focusing on the Take That reunion, nor that the story is picked up the the Sun.

No, the odd thing is that it takes two writers - of illustrious pedigree - to bring the news:

By JOHN KAY, Chief Reporter
and GORDON SMART, Showbusiness Editor

Really, Dominic? A light piece about an academic conference takes your chief reporter and your showbusiness editor which consists almost entirely of copying the call for submissions?

You might expect the piece to have some fun with the idea, or even work up a spot of outrage. But that's all absent, until you get to the comments from readers:

And they wonder why we expect students to pay for their own education

Well done, Siren2, bravely commenting on a subject about which you clearly have no understanding, what with the not knowing the difference between a research conference event and a degree course. And you wonder why we think education should be free so everybody can benefit.

The two senior Sun staff, though, just report the event straight:

Entries are being invited from students and staff specialising in psychology, literature, sociology, communication, gender and music industry studies. The best papers received will be published.

It's not every day that you see a paragraph like that in Bizarre. It doesn't even have the word "undercrackers" in it.

Perhaps this is a new service Gordon will be offering. I'm sure we'll read in great depth about the call for papers for the Transforming Government weekend at Brunel.

Job vacancy: Keeping the dead alive

The University of California at Santa Cruz are hiring a Grateful Dead archivist. You can be pulling down $52,860 – $68,892 a year - the only problem being you must have a masters in archive management and, as the advert puts it:

Expert knowledge in the history and scholarship of contemporary popular music, or American vernacular culture, preferably the history and influence of the Grateful Dead.

Filing the Cherry Garcia ice cream might prove troublesome.

[via Boing Boing]

Pete Doherty: What I think is...

There's nothing inherently wrong with inviting Pete Doherty to give a lecture, as The University Philosophical Society of Dublin has done. Providing, of course, there's a good reason for it, and it isn't just some ill-defined ramblings designed to draw attention to the society without adding much to the sum of human knowledge.

The Phil will be holding the infamous Pete Doherty to talk life, love and much more. Come for a taste of what a rock 'n roll (hopefully minus the sex and drugs) lifestyle entails and if you have any burning questions to ask, bring those too!

Although 'what's it all about, then?' might be an unwelcome intrusion.

At least Dolores O'Riordan - who is doing a session there this week - is going to sing some songs rather than just delivering an opinion-purge on an unknown subject.

Warner music proposes universities subsidise private record companies

Taking the ever-popular 'nice place you've got here, shame if something happened to it' usual background threat from the RIAA companies, Warner Music have developed a new model - suggesting to American universities that, if they bought a "licence" to cover anyone on their campuses who may or may not be downloading music, then they'll stop suing the universities.

You can see the attraction - Warners get more money than they could ever earn legitimately, the universities are out of pocket but no longer have to waste resources dealing with RIAA companies. Sure, it's effectively being made to hand over a large sum of cash to stop being bullied, but the record company line is 'what means more to you - keeping your lunch money or losing the threat of having your head pushed down the toilet'?

This, though, is just stage one: if they can persuade the universities that it's right and proper that record companies get cash in return for just the potential risk of downloaded pirate music, it will be a short step to arguing that anyone who logs on to the internet be treated in the same way. So, hey, perhaps the ISPs should pay a lets-not-call-it-a-tax for all their customers, right?

You'd have thought the labels might have quietly let this idea drop after the chilly reception it got years ago - especially since it seems to run contrary to the standard RIAA line. If people are covered by a blanket payment for downloading 'free' music, then doesn't that actually make it okay for them to take what, hitherto, have been unlicensed files? Doesn't it send that message - that music is free, not something to be paid for and cherished - that the RIAA has been trying to counter for the last decade?

And if it's fine for someone in Texas to download tracks with abandon, it follows that it must be fine for them to share the same tracks. How would the rest of the world's labels feel about the whole of America suddenly allowed to share their music online? Oh, sure, it might only be in America where the ISP tax allows the music to be sucked back down for free, but the creation of large pools of music online is going to be tempting for the French, the British, the Icelandic and everyone else.

Then you've got the likely reaction of services who have been working to create business models around legal music - who will want to listen to an ad-supported legal download if they're already paying for every tune they can think of free via the ISP tax? The music industry has been hoping for an iTunes killer for years; this would not just kill iTunes, but We7, SpiralFrog, Rhapsody, ZuneStore and anyone else who has tried to work with the RIAA companies.

Of course, there is one upside for the labels - if they're raking in money from a blanket agreement, they're not going to have to be quite so diligent in making sure these royalties flow to the artists. If someone buys an OMD track, time and money has to be invested in making sure Andy McCluskey gets his quarter cent; if the cash is flowing from a blanket payment, it's going to be much harder for artists to follow a trail from their music being downloaded to seeing payment.

A small advantage for the music industry, in the short term, but at the cost of completely destroying their own businesses. Only a suicidal business would embrace such a move. Does nobody in the RIAA have any ability to set aside their greed for gold, even in their own interests?

Rock and roll, I gave you the best years of my life and you treated me mean

Another survey purports to find a a link between the music you listen to and your personality:

The research, which was carried out by Professor Adrian North of Heriot-Watt University, is said to be the largest such study ever undertaken.

It suggested classical music fans were shy, while heavy metal aficionados were gentle and at ease with themselves.

Professor North described the research as "significant" and "surprising".

But are they either? Aside from a discovery that heavy metal fans are "gentle" - only a surprise if you don't know large numbers of metal fans who still live with their Mums and assume that metal is closer to practicing satanism rather than playing cowboys and indians.

I'm also a little unsure about the methodology - the research that Professor North is releasing today seems to have adopted a different approach to the current survey, which shows you pairs of lyrics and asks which you prefer before then inviting you to say how much you share your worries with your partner, and so on.

The partner questions suggest if you don't have a partner, you should think about your relationship with your most recent ex, and if you don't have one of those, you should talk about the sort of relationship you'd like to have, which seems to be a bit pointless. One of the questions is 'how far do you agree you worry your partner might leave you' - surely if you're thinking about an ex, you'd have to answer 'completely' and if you're imagining a perfect partner, you'd say 'not at all'?

[Last Year's Girl has a good post on this, too]

US government tell universities: Crack down on filesharing, or else

While most of the world is turning its face against the RIAA, at least they can rely on their stooges ("friends") in Congress. Harry Reid has just managed to sneak a new law onto the books which will force the 25 "worst offending" colleges (from a filesharing on campus point of view) to demonstrate their steps taken to crackdown - or lose their funding. How do you determine the worst offenders? By counting RIAA enforcement notices.

That's right - the education of hundreds of people will hang on the whims of the RIAA. Since they can choose to focus their notices where they choose, the RIAA has effectively been given the power to launch attacks on schools they dislike. Suddenly, buying EMI comes with an extra inducement - you'll have a chance to run universities out of business.

Stand up for students, says Harvard Professor

With the RIAA once again attempting to get universities in the States to hand over details of file-sharing students, Harvard professor Charles Neeson has published a demand (co-written with Wendy Seltzer) for the Ivy League institution to tell the record labels to go screw themselves:

One can easily understand why the RIAA wants help from universities in facilitating its enforcement actions against students who download copyrighted music without paying for it. It is easier to litigate against change than to change with it. If the RIAA saw a better way to protect its existing business, it would not be threatening our students, forcing our librarians and administrators to be copyright police, and flooding our courts with lawsuits against relatively defenseless families without lawyers or ready means to pay. We can even understand the attraction of using lawsuits to shore up an aging business model rather than engaging with disruptive technologies and the risks that new business models entail.

But mere understanding is no reason for a university to voluntarily assist the RIAA with its threatening and abusive tactics. Instead, we should be assisting our students both by explaining the law and by resisting the subpoenas that the RIAA serves upon us. We should be deploying our clinical legal student training programs to defend our targeted students. We should be lobbying Congress for a roll back of the draconian copyright law that the copyright industry has forced upon us. Intellectual property can be efficient when its boundaries are relatively self-evident.

But when copyright protection starts requiring the cooperation of uninvolved parties, at the cost of both financial and mission harm, those external costs outweigh its benefits. We need not condone infringement to conclude that 19th- and 20th-century copyright law is poorly suited to promote 21st-century knowledge. The old copyright-business models are inefficient ways to give artists incentives in the new digital environment.
[...]
The University’s educational mission is broader than the RIAA’s demands. We don’t have all the answers either, but rather than capitulating to special interests, we should continue to search for fair solutions that represent the University’s mission, its students, and the law in a way that educates students to be leaders of the digital 21st century.

The "special interests" is important here, of course: the RIAA doesn't have any claim to be the sole arbiter of musical law - it's a members organisation of vested powers, not a legally mandated independent body working in the name of culture. Let's hope Harvard chooses the opposite to an easy life, and rolling over for the corporate world - although when was the last time academia stood up to commerce?

What's she got to say to them?

I know its very easy to suggest that standards at British Universities have slid a bit, but even so - Charlotte Church to address the Oxford Union? "About the famous people she's met", apparently, which sounds that the OU is now picking its ideas from the ones left over by RI:SE. Still, after he recent slip of telling Canadians how happy she was in America, there's always the possibility that she'll start to wax lyrical about Cambridge.

We do love the way the Oxford Union spokesperson says "She's very brave coming here..." - yes, because after singing in front of the Pope and the President of the United States, not to mention numerous live TV appearances, the prospect of a few drunken hooray henry students must be paralysing, mustn't it?

'Tis the season to be bullied

What with that vital holiday season coming up, the RIAA have decided that it's time they gave the universities a bit of a kicking.

The Chronicle of Higher Education carries an email sent from Cary Sherman to Graham Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University. Let's see what they had to say...

Hi Graham. Wanted to send you a note to give you a heads-up that, in the next few weeks, we plan to increase notices of P2P infringement.

This sounds nice and cosy, doesn't it? Spanier is, for those who've missed this, wasting his precious time heading up some pointless committee to "allow" universities to liaise with the recording industry. The idea is to snuggle up to the RIAA in the hope that the next time they crack down on the free flow of information, there may be some scraps thrown to the academic sector so that there will be crawl holes in the legislation given to the RIAA.

As you know, the record industry has been facing steadily increasing piracy on P2P systems and other areas of the Internet.

Wasn't it booming the other day? Thank god its calmed down and is now only steadily increasing.

We've also seen a dramatic drop in CD sales this year.

Maybe you should try putting out some better CDs? Let's face it, the biggest release this Christmas is by Shania, a woman who's told Time magazine she isn't particularly arsed about making music, after all. Michael Jackson says he doesn't like pop music any more. If the people whose records you're selling don't have the heart for it, why would consumers?

As Internet piracy continues to exponentially rise with no relief in sight

Hang about - I thought it was rising steadily, not exponentially? You do realise those two things are different, don't you, Sherm?

and with the critical holiday retail season upon us, we are planning to increase the number of notices we're sending on P2P piracy.

Hang about... is piracy only a problem when its winter outside? Are you saying that its for some reason less important to "lose" sales during quieter periods? That seems rather odd. "RIAA happy to turn blind eye to filesharing during summer lull" is splendid news.

Until now, we've been somewhat circumspect in the number of notices we send and to date have sent a relatively small number of P2P-related notices compared to the large number of infringements we're finding, but we no longer feel that we can afford the luxury of ignoring infringements.

Hang about a minute... infringements you're finding - how exactly are you 'finding' these infringements? We have to say, frankly, we don't believe the RIAA is sitting in its air conditioned luxury with evidence that, say, kids at the university of south dakota are sucking whole Craig David albums out of the internet - laughing as they do so - and not doing anything. We'd suggest, actually, the reason why you've not done anything is because you haven't got anything; which is why we suspect you're sending a letter going "You have never seen the rage of a salaried lawyer from the RIAA" in the hope that universities will panic, and unplug all the computers. In short, you're trying it on, aren't you?

These notices will be sent to the ISP or organization that is responsible for the Internet protocol address from which an infringing sound recording is offered.

Scary for any university which has students dopey enough to use their student webspace to offer MP3s. Mind you, we can only think of the McDonalds Hamburger University that would have such ridiculously low-calibre students. Unless, of course, you're hacking systems?

This will certainly increase the number of P2P infringement notices that universities and colleges are receiving from the RIAA.

Really? Why certainly? This whole habit of second-guessing is getting way out of hand - it's like Iraq, isn't it? You could at least do us the honour of pretending you care whether there's any evidence or not before you act.

Just wanted to make sure you were aware of this before we started sending out the notices. If you have questions about this, please let me know. And please feel free to forward this information to anyone else in the university community.

Just wanted to use you as a conduit for our heavy-handed bullying of the American academic establishment. You might want to throw in some stuff of your own about our might sword of truth or something.

Have a great Thanksgiving holiday, and I look forward to seeing you on December 10th.

Mwah! Mwah! We'll be round then to loosen the buttplug. Until then, don't sit down - love, Cary x.