The NYT has a story today about students organizing over the broad issue of copyright constraints. The organizing came after students started getting letters from the RIAA, and some had to settle for sharing music files. But the point of the story is this:

But in recent months, the group has made a point of branching out beyond music copyrights. At its first national conference, held at Harvard in May and attended by more than 130 people, speakers gave presentations on topics like enhancing Internet access in impoverished countries, and loosening patent regulations for pharmaceutical drugs.
…

The movement is not without its critics. Early on, Ethan Zuckerman, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, said the group should pick more consequential problems to rally around than access to music.

“Part of what’s so tricky about this movement is trying to pry apart access to entertainment from some of the more serious issues, like access to medicine,” he said. “The movement does itself a disservice by blending all the issues together.”

The idea that students will begin actually to organize on a large scale over this issue is far-fetched. More likely—and this is the record industry’s Achilles heel—is that students legally attacked by the RIAA will begin to fight back, simply and lethally. The industry can be sneaker-netted to death in a heartbeat once folks start swapping mp3 discs seriously. One lazily enterprising guy on the floor of a dorm can stick 15 or 20 CDs’ worth of new music onto a disc and pass it down the floor and distribute the equivalent of thousands of downloaded songs in an hour or two. (More energetic ones, of course, simply set up private nets for distributing songs among a trusted group.) This all happens now, of course. But as awareness grows of the results of the industry’s misguided and destructive legal campaign, won’t music fans begin to apprehend there’s an easy and devastating way to fight back?