Senate Majority Leader Takes On File Sharing

An anonymous reader writes "Colleges are up in arms — and the entertainment industry is ecstatic — over Sen. Harry Reid's plan to crack down on file sharing by students. Floor votes could be imminent." A commenter on the post said, "Unfortunately we are likely to see neither sense nor principle from the Democrats on this issue, as Hollywood is their biggest cash machine."

Comments

No way to combat filesharing

[Opportunist]

Let's be honest here, P2P will continue. Legally or illegally. The only difference is that if it becomes "illegal", only illegal content will be distributed via P2P and distributors of Linux and other legal distribution of software and content suffers. Currently, a lot of distributions benefit from being able to use their users' connection for distribution, taking pressure from their own lines. If P2P is "outlawed" (or not outright outlawed, but disallowed by universities and ISPs), people wanting to share illegal content will find a way around this filtering (because, well, whatever the ISP could do against you is peanuts against being sued by the mafiaa), while people who now spread Linux distributions will not risk breaking the law just to keep spreading their legally spreadable software.

What do you want to do to avoid it? Log the IP addresses of people using it? People will start onion routing their packets, using also existing onion routers so you can't tell that an IP you got is actually a culprit. Also people will start using "private" trackers and networks more than they already do. To avoid packet identification through mandatory logging at ISPs, packets will get wrapped in other headers (HTTP offers itself due to being the perfect "noise" to duck into).

Sad... But Not Suprising

[Shifty Jim]

I think a lot of us have seen something like this coming for a while. In fact the point in Reid's proposal that requires colleges to report their policies for policing and dealing with illegal file-sharing were already in the reauthorization bill before this. Congress is simply going after the easiest target in the conflict. There is plenty of illegal file sharing that goes on outside of colleges and universities, but if you target colleges and universities you get to blanket a number of people through a state-supported middleman without having to go after big telcom companies.

But I think the biggest points in the bill are the following. From the Article:

"Provide evidence" to the Education Department that they have "developed a plan for implementing a technology-based deterrent to prevent the illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property."
How can any viable and self-respecting college network do anything like this without crippling their network and expending an obscene amount of money and man-hours. Congress constantly proves themselves to be less that tech-savvy, and this extremely tall order is just more proof. And, more importantly, the last thing I need is another tuition increase to pay for it. :P

And secondly:

The measure would also require the education secretary to annually identify the 25 colleges and universities that have in the previous year received the most notices of copyright violations using institutional technology networks.
I think the /. has had enough articles knocking and attacking and explaining the DMCA and how easy it is to use them without any basis whatsoever. The threat of a public scolding is only going to make already jumpy school administrators more likely to cave to pressure and/or institute stiffer punishments.

But, I don't really think it matters all that much, something like this is going to go into law eventually, I'm afraid.

A little matter of history?

[tjstork]

forget what party gutted habeus corpus, thinks torture is OK,

Didn't the Democrats put 200,000 Japanese citizens in concentration camps during World War II?

Run MK-ULTRA, and numerous CIA / FBI abuses during the Cold War?

Allow J Edgar Hoover's FBI to amass data on US Citizens for almost 40 years?

Run illegal wiretaps throughout every Presidency since Truman?

The whole notion of Democrats having of moral superiority when it comes to civil rights has no historical basis in fact.

Our best hope would have been to have conservatives acting like conservatives, gutting the government rather than expanding it.

Re:oh really?

[captainjaroslav]

I think you missed his point. He's not claiming that Hollywood doesn't favor Democrats over Republicans. It's the statement "Hollywood is their biggest cash machine" that rings false. According to opensecrets.org's listing of contributions by industry, the sector that they call "TV/Movies/Music" gave the Dems about $14M in 2006 and $22M in 2004. It's true that they only gave Republicans $8M and $10M in those same years, however, here are the contributions to Democrats for other sectors in those same years:

Construction
2006 $16M (more than TV/Movies/Music)
2004 $20M (less)

Finance/Insurance/Real Estate
2006 $110M
2004 $140M

Health
2006 $36M
2004 $48M

Lawyers/Lobbyists
2006 $96M
2004 $150M

Misc. Business
2006 $57M
2004 $85M

Labor
2006 $57M
2004 $53M

Ideology/Single-Issue Money
2006 $98M
2004 $110M

So, according to these numbers, the Democrats have several bigger "cash machines" than Hollywood, even if you include the music industry in there. Your mind may stop being boggled now.

This proposal has already been withdrawn

[Doug_Tygar]

Slashdot is simply out of date. From the Chronicle of Higher Education's Today's News (for subscribers): Facing widespread outrage from college officials, a prominent senator withdrew legislative language on Monday that would have required some institutions to buy technological tools to curtail illegal file sharing on their campuses....