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Congress to Fight Piracy with Education Funds
Nomihn0 writes "The RIAA has announced that the House Education and Labor committee is considering an amendment, HR1689, to the Higher Education Act of 1965. The proposal would allocate federal education funds to anti-piracy measures on college campuses. Most concerning is the bill's wording. It's claimed that the proposal would 'save telecommunications bandwidth costs.' In other words, the government will fund private packet filtering and preferential bandwidth allocation. 'The Higher Education Act (HEA) generally allows schools to spend the money they receive only on certain prescribed areas such as financial aid grants and Pell loans. The new bill would allow that money to be used for more things, but does not contain a request for additional funding. Whether schools would be interested in using a limited pool of federal money to police student file-swapping remains to be seen.'"
Incrrrrrrredibly gay. I can't stand the federal government. Congress needs to have its balls cut off with a scalpel or rusty machette.
It makes sense. If they can cut off the larger usage things, such as downloads of this nature, then the bandwidth usage will go down, resulting in cheaper bandwidth bills if they have the contracts setup that way.
Anyone noticing that the RIAA and their associated music companies (keep in mind that their name is supposed to be hated, we're not supposed to hate sony/universal/emi and warner) tend to do things to piss off the most educated people, while the least educated don't notice? Also notice that the least educated people tend to listen to rap "music", and the associated pop music that these companies churn out? Personally, I'm sure that some executive is thinking, somewhere, that having a less educated country means more people to listen to their music. Besides the fact that they're using someone else's money to fight their battles for them.
Remember when Ars Technica used to be 20 page articles about the details of new processor designs...?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
In the year 2000, in the year 2000!
Students will learn from virtual classrooms, because the RIAA had taken all of the money for real campuses to fight online piracy.
In the year 2000, in the year 2000!
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
... financing education we will spend tax dollars on policing students, in order to save a dying industry? This is heavily F'd up, pell grants and loans don't pay for that much as it is. This deal must be great for the RIAA, less students receive funding to get into school (less piracy), and that money is spent harrassing those that can still afford to get there. Once again our tax dollars are going to work for industry rather than the people.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Heck, just start a class that teaches "musical awareness," where you learn more about bands who distribute their music without the aid of said corporations.
What the hell's a "gewie?"
Maybe they should take away your federal student loans if your caught downloading music, they do it if your caught with pot.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
>from the wait-we-need-those-for-books dept
eh? just download the audio books off p2p. oh.. right.
When the state and the corporations work tirelessly together to control our lives, we live in a fascist society. Smart people are unable to go to college because of lack of funds, and congress wants to waist money earmarked for education doing the RIAA's bidding. If the filtering is implemented, no doubt it will block all sorts of legitimate p2p usage, create further surveillance of student usage, and be one further step in eliminating free speech on the Internet. I don't know how anyone can still buy major label music without a heavy burden of guilt weighing upon them, nor can I understand how anyone can continue to vote for the two corporate backed parties.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
This seems to be a reaction with a full lack of understanding about how campus internet works. If too much money is being spent on bandwidth, then why not simply save money by placing bandwidth limits on each student and limiting access to common bittorrent ports and the like, instead of spending money to create a task force? LOL politics~
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Congress always provides a carrot and a stick. The carrot is ALWAYS funds and the stick is always penalties on funds.
The real question is - where's the stick?
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Kids will not listen to the federal government telling them not to steal music. They're used to "music as commodity." In fact, I'd say most of the kids in college today never used a computer without knowing you could get "free" music off of it. To them, this is like the federal government telling people to stop using cell phones because landlines are losing money.
The content industry needs to pull its head out of its ass. Times have changed. Your monopoly and ridiculous, antiquated system of telling people who gets what music or movies where is untenable in this day and age. Now that people have the ability to get the content they want from wherever it's produced, they'll do it. Why can't I buy Dr. Who from iTunes the day after it's released? I'd gladly do it. But because of an agreement that was struck decades ago, I have to wait for a butchered version to show up on Sci Fi if I want to get it legally. Why should Australians have to wait a year to get BSG on their TVs?
The content producers seem to have chosen to sue their fans rather than provide them with the content they want. And if they want too long, other, independent, content providers are going to eat their lunch.
(I know I'll get modded insightful, but I don't understand why. I'm just pointing out the obvious.)
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
With college tuition costs going through the stratosphere, this is a really great use of public education money. I'm so glad that once again our public officials are looking out for the interests of their constituents.
[Insert pithy quote here]
"Whether schools would be interested in using a limited pool of federal money to police student file-swapping remains to be seen."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the school "is your ISP", and therefore has common-carrier status. Why would they want to go to the trouble of censoring you? They would become liable for mistakes in doing so.
First off, how exactly would it be possible to enforce this other than through willing submissions from universities? Short of a bunch of Men in Black (mibs) physically checking the server to ensure that these funds are going to implement the said packet filtration system, is there really a way to remotely check and/or enforce this? Would there have to be only one unified method used to perform the filtering, and if so, what about colleges with a system that is incompatible with that unified method?
I'm not really too keen on student money being sent towards incriminating students and limiting bandwidth, but I'm really wondering about the realism behind this bill; how the hell would it be enforced with private colleges and universities?
"Congress to Fight Piracy with Education Funds"
Why is Congress fighting anything? They are a legislative branch, not a law enforcement branch! Yes, sure, they have to be informed to create appropriate legislative action, but NO NEW LAWS are required.
Federal financial aid to educational institutions should not be messed with to "fight piracy"
If they want to fight piracy, authorize some more money. When new taxes are levied to 'fight piracy' perhaps joe public will pay attention. Additionally, like the war on drugs, this war on piracy is misguided at best.
Copyright laws seem to be working just fine for everyone but the **AA. Why is that? This is what Congress should be doing; asking why the **AA are having so much trouble when other people are not.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
That'll be about as effective as the Drug Abuse Resistance Education class that taught all the pot heads in high school new ways to make a bong from a tin can. I mean common, it's not like people don't know what they're doing. They are either mad at the industry for all the DRM bull shit or they are just cheap and steal. Schools have never been super effective in teaching morals on stuff like this. In the end a person will do what ever is in their nature whether that means they'll pay for music or download it P2P.
I foresee class going like this.
Teacher: Class stay away from Bittorrent, Limewire and other P2P programs. You can download movies and songs without paying and that's bad because you're stealing.
Student: Wait, you don't have to pay?...How do you spell Bittorrent, I'm gonna go look that up!
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
"Sure! Yours?"
"Of course!, MP3 right?"
"20,000 files, see you here tommorow"
"Bye"
"Bye"
Give it up RIAA, you can't win.
Wait till BlueRay drives are popular...
If you don't deploy some kind of filtering or attitude readjustment, most of your traffic will be file sharing (and the majority of that will be of questionable legality). If you can slash your network traffic to one fifth or even less, you can delay the provision of new equipment and new connectivity for quite some time. Traditionally, this means that the nominal bandwidth you can offer to students and researchers is no longer competitive, so there is a strong incentive not to police traffic too much. Nobody will fund you 10GE if you are running at less than a third of GE (peak of the five-minute average).
It could well be that the public as a whole is better off if this vicious circle can be broken. Diverting funding might be an option to achieve that. But HR 1689 doesn't really address the core issue. Saving bandwidth doesn't cost money, just reputation.
This seems so desperate... How scared must the recording industry be of losing profit if they are willing to slap schools in such a roundabout way? They must be aware that an election year is coming, and all their bill-passing supporters may be on the way out, so they're trying to sucker-punch us all one last time before they lose all ability to influence govt policy.
stuff |
This amendment was introduced by Rep. Ric Keller (R-FL). Given that he is in the minority party, and the bill apparently does not have a Democratic co-sponsor (although I didn't look very hard), it is likely that it will die in committee, as most bills do.
Spending tax dollars to protect the interests of a specific private business (or set of such businesses) does not make sense.
Oh, and by the way, it is not "piracy." It is not even like piracy. It is data duplication. We should call it that.
Great, near hotel room level accommodations for students? My alma mater got, IIRC, about $100M from the state to spend. It basically wasted it on things that were not even needed like renovating student housing to make it look great to middle and upper class parents, not be safe, clean and functional. They spent God only knows how much money on decorations like flower beds, and this was a "good school!" Waste, waste, WASTE! And they didn't even fix the parking.
So why am I not outraged? This **MIGHT** actually cut back on how students use the network. We had two T3s that were constantly choked by student file sharing. It got to the point for a while before they put the traffic shapers in place that you couldn't even reliably get to anything on Google half the time.
First off, this really shows who congress serves, large contributors, and not the people. "Piracy" is being defined as the use of copyrighted works for any purpose without paying some big company. This is not the case, Fair Use allows many types of copying and use of copyrighted materials without any royalty being due.
This is the problem of the RIAA and MPAA not the government.
If the &^AA thinks they find individual probles , let them take action using civil law.
Subsidizing the biased terror tactics of the &^AA's and the BSA is clearly using our government power to unjustly enrich these greedy and evil entity's.
Public Funding of elections is what is really needed to stop this.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Maybe they should make sure the students can READ before they start sucking money up for this.
What about the piracy of publicly funded works being privately owned? What about the piracy of ideas, where an entity (such as a corporation) can claim to "own" an idea, and enforce it?
If a college being your ISP is a common carrier, then the network at any business would be a common carrier. It's not.
It's not a common carrier because the only people who have any access to the network are people who attend the school or work there. In dorm rooms, the university simply extends the privilages to those in the dorms and provides you a more liberal usage policy as compared to a business.
John Q. Smith on the street can't simply walk into campus and say "give me a connection." There may be some gray areas here, such as extending service to alumni or some other groups, but in general campus ISPs are not considered common carriers.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Let's just get this disclaimer out there: I am no fan of the RIAA. I am however disturbed by what appears to be a recent trend on Slash/Digg badmouthing bandwidth allocation by ISPs, colleges and publicly accessible corporate networks. Do you guys think the RIAA invented DiffServ, IP Precedence and CBWFQ? Do you guys not realize what would happen if college campuses took an egalitarian approach to bandwidth allocation? "Gee, BiTtorrent deserves just as much bandwidth as our campus wide VoIP network and H323 lectures from foreign universities". You're average college kid is going to treat your bandwidth like free beer and suck up every last drop they can. It's called the Tragedy of the Commons.
War on education and young people, go! Those filthy young ones, all they think of is the initial sin, right? Although the initial sin was trying to be equal to God (pride), not sex. By the way, Adam and Eve couldn't have been adulterating if it was just the two of them, and they were married, right?. Anyway, let's sue them kids, let's take their money away, let's brainwash them, let's put them in jail, that will teach them, right? They need to learn that being younger than us power people never pays.
That means that if I go back to Europe, my kids will have much better chances in life than any of yours... Oh well, so be it then.
IS2M a deeper issue is not whether the policy of discouraging downloading is good or bad, but whether Congress should combine that issue with the issue of funding Pell grants. These are really two separate matters that could be addressed in different bills.
It is as if Congress were to put 2 different bugs into a single bug ticket. Trying to figure out whether the proposed fix will work gets harder the more things you put into a single fix.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
This isn't news. Ridiculous bills like this get considered all the time. Hasn't some congressman sponsored a bill to re-initiate the draft within the last year?
This amendment to the HEA is completely ludicrous--I trust our lawmakers to strike it down.
...The Democrats aren't much better than the Republicans at this part of the game however. I'll have to keep an eye on this.
Blar.
I know I'll get modded insightful, but I don't understand why. I'm just pointing out the obvious.
If it truly was obvious, it would be unquestionable, and not even worth stating; However in doing so, you must be the only one able to answer this quandry. Do you know why you are posting?
Seriously though, it is worth stating because it isn't obvious. If it were, the situation would be different today. Hell, most people aren't even aware of their rights and how to protect them. This should be taught in school, but it isn't. Getting a job and finding what you want to do in life should be taught in school, but it isn't.
I don't reply to Anonymous Cowards.
Well la-de-da. Hopefully you still read 'em. Really... why limit yourself?
So my federal student aid, which I amazingly want to use to actually finish my education, can now be used to sue one of my classmates to the point that they are forced to drop out of school, which reduces job income, and eventually works through the cycle into the fact that I get even less student aid than I got before. Self-perpetuating destruction of the college education system...brought to you by the RIAA/MPAA/MAFIAA!
Link to their explanation of the bill.
"Illegal downloading of music and movies on college campuses is harming their computer networks by consuming a huge amount of education-related bandwidth"
"There are numerous options to download music legally - online retailers such as iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody and eMusic charge varying amounts for song and album downloads."
I guess the legal music services don't use up bandwidth.
This is bullshit. Here are the members of the House Education and Labor committee:
Committee members
Please, start to express to these people how misguided this effort is NOW before he can get a co-sponsor and take it further.
Ric Keller is a member of the Pell Grant Caucus, and as such, he will need to drastically re-write This Page if this thing goes through.
... financing education we will spend tax dollars on policing students, in order to save a dying industry?It doesn't appear to be about policing but oriented toward technological 'solutions'. Basically it appears a way of mandating DRM, perhaps M$ DRM, into all the classrooms at taxpayer expense.
I have a better idea. Let's disband the RIAA and each of it's members, selling off the assets for Pell grants and interest-free study loans.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I can definitely appreciate the many posts so far on this story that condem this blatant corporate/government abuse of our education system. However, it's too bad that many people don't see the root of this problem. This type of philandering has been the modus operandi of our government for years, in just about every industry. The government's interference in the technology and entertainment markets are just as heinous as paying farmers not to grow crops in order to keep prices up, or appropriating money from social security into their pet pork projects. I look forward to the day when peaceful citizens do not have their resources forcibly taken from them in order to fund completely irrelevant ventures that mostly profit the wealthy, moneyed interests of our country. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to mis-use money when it is not yours to begin with. Especially when it is almost never in line with the "public interest", whatever that means.
I'm sick of paying on them anyways!
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Do something about it (or at least try to)
write your representatives
http://www.house.gov/writerep/
Everyone should get at least a semester of it! Start with the history -- original copyright and patent lengths and intentions, the subversion of those intentions by corporate lobbies and what you are and are not allowed to do with various media. There's a lot of ignorance surrounding the current situation and I think that people do need to be educated about it. I think that if a lot more people were aware of what a tangled mess the current set of laws are, they'd get straightened out eventually. Oh wait... that's not what the industry wants?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Apparently the RIAA thinks the flood of subpoenas and "pre-settlement letters" it's sending out isn't enough to encourage universities to fight piracy on their own... idiots. UCLA was spewing anti-piracy crap all over even BEFORE they started targetting colleges.
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
As an employee within the higher education system, it certainly seems as of late that the RIAA is targeting colleges and relaxing their stranglehold on private ISP's. Are others seeing this as well?
I new I forgot something!
The NRCLB Act of 2007 will ensure that under-performing record companies get their fair share of taxpayer funds in order to prop up their dying business models. A Congressional Spokeman stated "this act guarantees that these poor companies and their starving executives continue to provide campaign funds to us congress-critters that are so desperately needed during these lean times." He added "its a win-win situation for them and for us." When asked about how this impacts actual funds for higher education for actual students, he quipped "for who?".
Hey, this bill was introduced by an anti-labor, pro-war Republican, with zero co-sponsors. Yes, the RIAA might dream of using educational funds to prevent sharing of information, but what with even major music companies bailing out from RIAA, I don't think they can strong-arm anything through. What with guys like the sponsor of this stupid bill in the minority, it really is worth slashdotters who obviously feel strongly about this to take a few minutes to let the members of the committee know how you feel.
http://www.house.gov/writerep/
Here's what I wrote to my House Rep, I urge you to do the same:
--------
I am writing you today to urge you to OPPOSE the recently introduced bill "H.R. 1689: To provide support to combat illegal downloading on college and university campuses".
I'm dismayed that the House is wasting time and taxpayer money with this bill, who's real purpose is clearly the support the dying business model of much of the American entertainment industry. While the bill is ostensibly purposed to reduce computer-bandwidth costs at large universities and increase computer network security at these campuses, I believe those reasons do NOT match its real purpose. There are many high-bandwidth applications college students make use of which are NOT illegal and do NOT support educational initiatives, such as streaming internet radio, online software installers and updaters (like Steam), online video (like YouTube), and many others. I don't see any House bills introduced to top the use of *those* services to decrease band-width usage.
In addition, we should not be taking federal funds away from *real* educational initiatives to teach college students that, essentially, "stealing is bad", a concept they should have learned in kindergarten. If I had to choose between that message and a more worthwhile educational message (like real college classes, perhaps?), I'd choose the later any day.
I'd also like to take issue with item 3 in "SEC. 2. FINDINGS": "(3) Additional staff and resources are required to respond to notices of illegal downloading, costing more money." There is NO need for colleges to respond to these notices in any way, shape, or form. They are merely threatening letters designed to extort money from college students who the sender (RIAA, MPAA, etc) believes downloaded materials illegally. If the student pays a few thousand dollars, the sender won't take them to court (not that they'd win anyway, these are just fishing expeditions). A subpoena is an entirely different matter, and these notifications are NOT subpoenas.
In conclusion, please oppose H.R. 1689.
Abstract and artificial concepts like IP is not something college students can comprehand. Lets hope they don't get in trouble with basic things such as using birth control or knowing their alcohol tolerance. Just exempt anyone under the age of 25 from copyright laws and let them not get into a habit of pirating in the first place. Of course current copyrights last way too long to make sense to anyone, not just kids.
Remember when Ars Technica used to be 20 page articles about the details of new processor designs?
They still do that but those details don't mean a thing when bad laws get in the way of your using that processor the way you want. Bill that threaten the freedom of the internet are news worthy. You need to stand up and express your concern while you still can. QoS and similar programs are designed to lock you out of the digital future the way your parents were locked out of publishing in the analog past.
Wasting public education money in the interests of large publishing companies is disgraceful. The reason given, the supposed "theft" of "billions of dollars in intellectual property from hardworking people whose jobs hang in the balance," is disgustingly cynical when those same companies are busy offshoring as fast as they can and when the creators of that "property" are the very people victimized by the lockdown. Your culture is yours to share, not theirs to profitter.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
i sincerely hope you are not advocating this ultimate expression of dystopia..
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Haul these thieves butts from the protections of the school to a public place for a proper beating, and while your there beat the parents and any other officials too. Because the pain of digital theft needs to be felt far and wide. It is a federal crime, thievsters, to steal digital content and now that the government has become educated on the seriousness of this crime, you will too.
Isn't that the point? He's saying that the basic problem here is that too much money is being spent on college campuses on bandwidth. So instead of trying to run some kind of strict enforcement, why not just limit bandwidth? After all, it's only an internet line for schoolwork, so it shouldn't be needed for anything more than the basics. At least, that's what this senator in question is saying, and thus his argument holds about as much water as a sieve.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Now the students can have a real highspeed bandwith again. My friend at Northwestern has seen his bandwith go from awesome to barely faster than a 56k modem once Napster and limewire was on every college kids desktop. The costs to upgrade the lan are outrageous and many games such as quake2 became unplayable.
;-). I am not in favor of censoring but its expensive to handle such bandwith hogs. Packet shaping I am in favor for.
You can tell by my post that this was awhile back but I remember seeing similiar posts at the time here at slashdot. The lines should be used for academia first off above anything else and maybe wow or halflife second
http://saveie6.com/
Karma whoring ain't what it used to be, noes?
Mnemonic device further explored...
If RIAA (sony,universal,emi,warner) = RIAA SUE W , then we can take it further...
W = Double "U"
"Double U" = 2 U's = "RIAA SUE U2" = The question we eventually will ask each other :
"RIAA sue you, too?"
The thinking is the MAFIA talks to schools about the piracy. The schools say we don't have enough money to setup monitoring and the money we have can't be used for monitoring. The MAFIA talks to it's lobbied politicians who then change the rule to allow money be spent on monitoring.
The problem is the MAFIA's interests are coming before the interests of the students. The students being vulnerable in our society (no time or money to fight back) have lost any sort of social support from the political system.
The US as a country is broken."Never say Never."
The RIAA is on the losing side of an technological arms race, They can spend hundreds of millions fighting bittorrent, and if they succeed, a student will simply write an encrypted bittorrent like client that operates soley on port 80, you could hide bittorrent data as jpg. Their is no differentiating that data. The only reason it doesn't exist is because students aren't being pushed enough. Hell even myself and some of my friends were considering recreating waste(encrypted file sharing community network) in python. This line of actions could end up very badly for RIAA's supporters. Students will always get there free data, whether its swapping .5tb disk drives or 2gb thumb drives or university networks or limewire or bittorrent or dvdrw or some encrypted software.
. . . use my tax dollars to help students buy music legally. There's already government subsidized meal plans, why not media plans? Taxpayers would still have to pay, but students, artists, and IT would benefit. PLUS, record labels would bitch less. Obviously, I'm being unrealistic . . . Anyways, I'd LOVE to see the government spend more money on education, but (as others have already stated) using tax dollars to protect a private industry is not what I want my tax dollars being used for.
While the bill could be better written, the findings are correct and the first subparagraph is a good use of government funds on college campuses.
The second subparagraph that the OP pointed out would allow federal funds to go to possibly go to college campus use of packet filtering specifically when it comes to illegal downloading of music, etc. This bill does not talk about net neutrality at all, which the OP tried to imply, plus it will also, long term, probably save campuses money. Right now they are spending "significant" (the bill doesn't give more detail and I don't remember myself) amounts of money dealing with the increased bandwidth, tech support calls from virus infected users, and dealing with the MAFIAA.
Clones are people two.
Well I hope I made a diffrence, I contacted my local congressional representitive... Bill Sali!e ws/1766565/posts
I don't know how much good this will do... After all he did try to outlaw gravity...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-n
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
The architects at my school are forced to work in an old building given to us by the agriculture students far on the other side of campus. Since most of us basically live there (and go there when the campus buses aren't running, i.e. 1 AM, etc... to work on projects), we are forced to eat horrible food (they placed it far FAR away from even the overpriced cafes on campus, so all we have is this vending machine and what we bring ourselves), work next to horses and their mess, fight the flies, and leave for class 45 minutes early when I LIVE ON CAMPUS because I have to take 2 buses!
BUT WE HAVE TO STOP PIRACY!!! Bullshit. Piracy won't stop. Its that simple. If need be, students will use the same ports they use for online lecture downloads for DC++ ports...in the end its about 10 admins with money versus 10,000 students who don't want to pay money.
I hate how money is spent. New cafe attached to the library (which closes 2 floors of the library for years): YES! Not having the architects work in a storage facility for hay. Nah.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
This sounds familiar...
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
So now I lose my Pell Grant AND my free music! I could of used my grant money to buy music ,but now I guess I'll stick with pirating it, because this will make me have even less money. Then when I drop out of school because I don't have money to pay for it I guess I won't get a nice paying job so instead of being able to BUY music my only alternative will be to pirate it. Oh well too bad.
Talk about a non-sequitur.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --