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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
"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
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.
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"
Even if what you said is true, which I highly doubt (since from what I understand packet filtering and QoS is more expensive to run than adding bandwidth, and end to end encryption would defeat it I would think), who is to say the money saved from such an endeavor will go back into the Pell grants and the like?
Technical arguments aside, taking money away from student loans to finance this seems risky at best. If there is no clause that requires accounting of the money saved, and it's redirecting back towards student loans, this is certainly a Bad Investment(tm).
That also doesnt even begin touch on how it's morally wrong to use education money for the private interests of copyright holders.
meep
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!
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.
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?