Word: access
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Commercial activities in school raise fundamental questions about the nature and purposes of schooling, and pose difficult questions for policy makers who must decide about the appropriateness of trading access to students for free equipment, money or supplies. However, a recent General Accounting Office report noted that although commercialism in schools is now widespread, policy makers have yet to formulate a satisfactory response...
Commercial activities now shape the structure of the school day, influence the content of the school curriculum and may determine whether children will have access to a variety of technologies. Moreover, for the foreseeable future, it is likely that school commercialism will continue to increase both in the variety of its expressions and its intensity. In a culture in which commercials are a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week curriculum, those of us who would make schools ad-free zones have our work...
Harvard's recent refusal to block student access to the Napster music trading service is commendable. The University's reply, along with similar refusals by other universities such as Stanford and Princeton, provides a welcome contrast to the sad cowardice of Yale, which fully blocked Napster access last April in response to a lawsuit. More importantly, the decision reaffirms the principle that universities should be allowed to trust students with responsibility for their online conduct. The question that Harvard must now confront is one of enforcement when students make the wrong decision: The University must use discretion when addressing accusations...
Although the Napster system may frequently be used to access copyrighted material, the same could be said of telnet, ftp, HTTP, NFS, Windows networking and every other electronic communications protocol yet devised. A ban on Internet traffic directed through Napster might create a precedent that would force the University to take steps more restrictive of student freedoms...
...moment, however, the University must develop a clear policy on how it will respond to copyright infringement by students. Should Metallica or other artists inform the University of cases of copyright infringement, the DMCA would require Harvard to remove the network access of repeat offenders. Yet the concept of a "repeat" offender is not well-defined, and we encourage the University to use restraint in removing students' access to the network. Official warnings should be sufficient in most cases to scare students into compliance, and the heavy penalty of losing network access--which, Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis...