I was deeply concerned when I read Justin Noga's column, Systematic blackmail could help rub out school's deficit
regarding RIAA tactics and public fiddling in last week's Summer Post. Although this article was likely meant to be viewed as a satirical piece of prose, I found it extremely hard to follow the logic behind what Noga was trying to communicate to his audience.
Somewhere amid his lucid ranting, Noga neglected to research school policies in order to discover that an RIAA response to the illegal activities of students was inevitable.
The Student Code of Conduct states that, In making acceptable use of resources you must NOTG?use resources to violate the university codes of conduct or engage in any illegal activity. All of us at Ohio University are bright individuals and are fully aware that the downloading of unlicensed music files, or music files that were not purchased through a legitimate service qualifies as illegal. In fact, the majority of the students that were interviewed by your newspaper upon receiving litigation letters from the RIAA agreed that his or her actions were illegal.
Before the university even received word that the RIAA would be ascending upon our beloved school, IT began shutting off students' Internet access due to its hoarding of network resources, as well as illegal file sharing. The RIAA also gave students a letter warning them that they needed to cease their involvement in illegal file sharing before they were prosecuted. As illustrated by the April 25 press release on the OU home page, we see that OU also began cracking down on illegal file sharing. This was not an effort to prosecute students, but an action meant to stop students' destructive behavior before they were sued by the RIAA. However, these warnings did not stop some students.
Lastly, I would like to remind Mr. Noga that under Ohio code and OU policy, public fiddling is also illegal. In the OU student code of conduct public nudity can be described as disorderly conduct, an A7 violation. These actions are labeled as public indecency in section 2907.09 of the Ohio Revised Code.
I would urge Noga to read up on this code to see that all of the behavior listed in his column is illegal. According to the author's analogy, if OU is guilty of prosecuting students for this behavior, wouldn't the administration's actions also be justified?
Students involved in the RIAA fiasco were clearly in violation of both federal and OU policy, and some students even admit their fault in these cases. While we may not agree with the means in which these events transpired, we must accept that both OU and the RIAA were simply doing their job and abiding by the rules that were explicitly stated in several forms and were always made available to students.
Furthermore, I would strongly urge the journalists of The Post to research their arguments more before publishing a column that is both unfounded and unreasonable.Ben Palmer is a senior English major at Ohio UniversityBen Palmer is a senior English major at Ohio University
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