Ithaca College Issued RIAA Legal Notices, Violates Student Privacy

In this week's issue of The Ithacan, an article was featured about the issuance of even more RIAA legal notices. This is not the first time, nor the first school that has been targeted. In March, the IP addresses of multiple students were identified and the students were issued legal documents giving the choice of the following: an outrageous fine or an even more outrageous and costly trial. In the case of the RIAA who has been suing everyone they can get their hands on including children as young as 14, not much can be done to improve public opinion of them until they stop stomping on the little to get money. The RIAA needs to realize that suing innocent people for hundreds of thousands is not the answer, but rather promoting legal file sharing instead of illegitimately attacking young students.

That being said, the focus of my rant is not the RIAA, but rather Ithaca College. You see, many colleges and universities across the nation have been supplied with a lengthy list of IP addresses involved in illegal file sharing. After receiving these notices, the school is asked to forward the letters to the students owning the IP addresses. Otherwise, there is no way that the RIAA can link the IP address to a person. However, the schools are not obligated legally or otherwise to actually do so and in fact many institutions have refused in order to protect the privacy of their students. Two such universities are Boston College and MIT, who recently won a court case with the RIAA alleging that the subpoenas violate privacy policy.

Ithaca College on the other hand, not only eagerly released the names of the students to the RIAA, but they actually judicially referred the students themselves! As if a totally unlawful, outrageous, and unfair fine is not enough, an involved student must bear a black mark on their judicial record. Regardless of how one feels about piracy or file sharing, it is clear that if IC does not want to make a bad name for itself, it ought to start protecting the privacy rights of its students and they can begin by telling the RIAA to take their subpoenas and shove them up their money hungry asses.

China Bans Crude Birth Control Slogans

So I just happened to stumble upon this article when I googled a completely unrelated topic, but since I got a bit of a laugh out of it, I figured I would share. The article, China Family Planning Slogans, is about the Chinese government's recent decision to revise their campaign to encourage people to have fewer children.

In 1979, in order to slow the rapid growth of the already enormous population, China implemented the "one child" law. In addition, ads featuring slogans discouraging large families have been displayed throughout the country ever since. Such slogans included "Raise fewer babies but more piggies" and "One more baby means one more tomb."

Believe it or not,these ads were considered to be "poorly worded" and "full of strong language" by the Chinese people and they felt as if the government were "simply forcing people to give up having more babies." In light of this, China has decided to "give a friendlier face" to the family planning campaign stop using these slogans, replacing them with "warm" and "humanistic" slogans to promote birth control and encourage people to have less children rather than frightening them into not having more. Some of these new slogans include emphasis on the 'equality of boys and girls' due to the still widespread preference of having boys over girls.

I was just amused by this because I would think that anyone who was at all concerned about possible public outcry and societal opinion would never force citizens to get abortions and sterilizations and issue slogans such as those promising to "topple houses and confiscate cows" if the demands of population control are not met.