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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.'"
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.
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.
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 *
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.
If bandwidth is the problem it is better to attack that problem if you can because in order to ID P2P you would need at least a Layer 7 flow analysis to be done which is high tech voodoo and relies on the traffic protocol not being encapsulated in an encrypted layer. I have seen schemes where long term and short term data transfer tallies were used on a group of MAC addresses registered to user to dynamically limit bandwidth. If done right most users are unaffected and abusers of shared bandwidth get a 56k connection.
I think the way we get artists paid is two fold.
First, I think that iTunes showed that if you make the online store easy enough to use, people would rather buy from there rather than steal music. I know that I'd much rather spend a buck to get a song I like there than hunt down a good copy on a P2P service. And now that I can get certain songs DRM free and at virtually CD quality, why would I even use a P2P service?
Second, the Internet has empowered artists to go directly to the people. Folks like George Hrab and Jonathan Coulton have made enough money on their "side projects" to quit their day jobs. In fact, Jonathan Coulton has said that he makes more per month than the Dresden Dolls, who are signed to a major label.
So by making a distribution method easy for customers and artists alike, we create an environment where artists get money directly from the customers without going through hoops. And because the overhead is extremely low, there's no reason a good artist couldn't make a decent living.
The reason the record industry is failing to help smaller artists is because the old record industry had so much overhead. Between studio time, promotions, pressing the albums, and having so many people at so many levels taking a cut, the artists never really got rich unless they sold millions of albums.
Granted, this new music industry, and indeed the new content industry as a whole, won't make anyone super rich, but it will spread the wealth amongst many more artists, and create a system where exposure to artists is mostly word of mouth.
That is if the record companies don't succeed in smothering it in its crib.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
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?"