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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.'"
. . . 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.