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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.
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.