In that case we were responding to the portion of the bill that would give collective licensing agencies the ability to enter into the computer systems of universities, take a look around, audit, and check on what might be at intranet services within a particular course to see which items they claim are in their repertoire and might be used.
As I mentioned in our written brief, one big problem with that is the alarm bells would go off among the professorial community that academic freedom is potentially being infringed. For such a long time we've had the practice within universities that our employers—university administrations who would be part of such a monitoring system—do not check up on what we're taking out of the library, what goes on in our classrooms, and so forth. In fact the origin of another group that was here before the committee, the CAUT, goes back to a very famous case of academic freedom where a professor who actually became dean of the college that I worked in at York was punished by his university principally on ideological grounds.
My president has no need to know whether I read Adam Smith or Karl Marx.