Rich sez, “After receiving some copyright violation warnings from various notifying agencies, forwarded to me by Boston University, my school account was shut down. To get it back, I had to have a talk with Jim Stone, self-proclaimed ‘DMCA Enforcer.’ I think I might have been the first person to ever disagree with him. It was interesting to me to see what he, a cop and a lawyer, thought of various copyright issues. He seems completely oblivious to the importance of the issue in relation to free human society, and cares only about it from a financial aspect.”
I spend about an hour with him. Initially, he does not like me. He says that most of the people that come into his office normally “cave”, which I suppose means apologize and promise never to do it again. I think it makes him mad that I don’t do that and he gets pretty defensive. When I disagree with the things he says, he calls me “brain-dead” and a “smart-ass”. He writes a note in my BU account file in case I ever have to get a lawyer, which prevents him from getting in trouble if my lawyer tries to use the argument that I wasn’t properly informed about the situation. In that note he calls me “arrogant” and mentions something about my non-compliance and my not comprehending the gravity of the situation. While essentially holding hostage my ability to function as a BU student, he makes me answer a series of questions and promise to never violate copyright law again. When I tell him I promise not to do it on the BU network, he calls me a smart-ass again. He maintains that he’s not the bad guy and that he’s just the messenger and he’s really on my side, but really he makes it very clear that he has no interest in helping me personally. The only justification he has is that if enough students get sued and have to drop out due because of insanely high costs (as has happened numerous times in the past few years), then the school has less money and his paycheck goes down. He mentions this multiple times. Throughout the interview, he maintains an attitude of “I’m just doing my job,” or “If I didn’t do it, somebody else would.” He’s clearly never considered the philosophy of not participating in evil things.
(Thanks, Rich!)
Update: Matt sez, “If he really cares about freedom, he should install BU Linux, which includes
GNU Octave. Using proprietary
software and claiming to be the poor underdog fighting for our rights is
just a cover-up for being too lazy to take the approach that really advances
freedom.”