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.'"

Comments

hmm

[mastershake_phd]

Maybe they should take away your federal student loans if your caught downloading music, they do it if your caught with pot.

Re:hmm

[delirium of disorder]

Maybe they should take away your federal student loans if your caught downloading music, they do it if your caught with pot.

Downloading music is perfectly legal. Perhaps you refer to downloading copyrighted music from RIAA signed bands? Why anyone would want to download music from major label musicians (much less buy that shit), is beyond me. I want to relate to an artists view of the world; I want to share their experiences and ideas through their music. Knowing that they signed to the RIAA disgusts me so much that I just can't listen to them anymore. They become corporate shills instead of real human beings.

Why should you get kicked out of school for smoking pot? It's safer than alcohol and tobacco.

Fascists

[delirium of disorder]

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.