Anti-P2P College Bill Moving Through House

An anonymous reader writes "A news.com article is covering an amendment to the College Opportunity and Affordability Act (pdf) that should make folks in Hollywood, the RIAA, and the MPAA well pleased. The tiny section seeks to hinge government approval of an institution of higher learning on whether or not they adequately dissuade Peer-to-Peer filesharing of copyrighted materials. The Act came out of the House Education and Labor Committee, which agreed on the terms unanimously. There is still some question, though, as to what penalties should be handed down for institutions that don't do enough to protect intellectual property. 'Some university representatives and fair-use advocates worry that schools run the risk of losing aid for their students if they fail to come up with the required plans. "The language in the bill appears to be clear that failure to carry out the mandates would make an institution ineligible for participation in at least some part of Title IV (which deals with federal financial aid programs)," Steven Worona, director of policy and networking programs for the group Educause, said in a telephone interview Thursday.'" Update: 11/16 16:36 GMT by Z : PDF link corrected.

Comments

I have another bill that should be passed

[ByOhTek]

Ban anyone from breathing if the join the RIAA.

No offence, but why should one illegal activity like that be treated above all others? Here's one, one that's more useful, ban the funding to colleges that don't do enough to prevent rape on campus. That would actually be a good crime-prevention to tie to funding, and it is a problem.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like stealing (or the less wieldly intellectual property infringement if you prefer), and it's bad. But this industry that has long since lost 95% of it's creativity and intelligence, is now trying to force money from people, threatening the creativity and intelligence of those people also? Make people dumber so they like your stuff more? Make Brittany Spears and Backdoor Boys more popular?

That is the stupidest waste of legal paper I've seen in a long time.

Everything is copyrighted

[webmaster404]

Just about eveyrhting that can be shared through P2P is copyrighted. For example those Linux ISOs I downloaded last night, they were copyrighted, now they were under the GPL which allows me to share them, but it still is copyrighted. So are the creative commons works, so now can we not share them like the licence allows us to do due to this bill? It is so much like the *IAA to try to distroy innovation. People are wondering why America has lost business and tech domonence yet would vote for this bill. They would egarly press for more education in computers, yet favor Microsoft which got us here in the first place. Our new motto for our country should be "Don't innovate, don't share and don't learn unless you have paid your patent protection fees and copyrights to the *IAA"

It is the universities that will suffer from this

[BobMcD]

The saddest part of this flawed logic, to me, is that the established schools that would qualify for this federal money will suffer the most from this. My generation was a part of that 'absolutely everyone must go to college or they will forever be unemployed' push. Back then, only drop-outs and teen moms ever went to 'night school' or 'community college'. This, in recent years, has changed a lot.

There are now a lot of ways to get a degree, and since the employee market is flooded with them now, they don't have nearly as much meaning as they once did. And the traditional schools pumping out so many psychology and sociology majors (my self included) without any job market to support them has added to this problem. Degrees are like driver's licenses these days. Your boss wants a copy for their file, but never really looks at it again.

Locally we've seen huge growth in 'technical colleges' and 'education centers'. My wife goes to Kaplan online. A good friend of mine used the University of Pheonix. Have they suffered for those choices? Not really, because the name on the degree isn't that important any more. Just like with comic books, when you print too many of the damn things the value goes way, way down.

With that in mind, imagine the bevy of options a young person would have these days in terms of education. Imagine also that they get to their dorm room and realize that they can't use the internet. Well, technically they can, but they lose access to a lot of content that is important to them. Their lives for the next five years (and yes, the profit model really does encourage at least four and a half...) will be less enjoyable for a number of reasons. Should access to the internet be one of them?

And in this mindset, how many will begin to wonder if their credits will transfer?

This is why Republicans want small government

[AHumbleOpinion]

let's throw out the existing governmental system, you know the one that is bought and paid for by the corporations, or anyone with the cash on hand to do so and replace it with SOMETHING THAT FREAKING WORKS

Actually our "wise" elected leaders do not pander merely to money, they pander to those without money just as well when the contribution-challenged represent a likely voting block. I'm about to use the "R' word, please try to keep your emotions in check and read the entire comment before firing off a flaming response. Thanks. ;-) Republicans, the real one - not the one's running the show today, prefer a smaller federal government due to legislation like this. It is not that they do not believe that government has some responsibility towards educations. It is that they believe that many things are better handled by more local government - state, county, city, school board - where we have more of a say in things. In other words local control rather than distant control from Washington, DC. If you take federal money you better damn well expect that there will be federal strings attached.

Democrats, the real one - not the one's running the show today, used to agree on that last point about federal strings. John F Kennedy, during the 1960 presidential debate, was against federal support of public schools for this reason. He argued that if the federal government helps it should be with one time costs, like construction of a school, and not with ongoing costs such as salary, books, etc. He warned that the later will invariable come with strings. As the US election season gets going keep an eye open for the 1960 Nixon/Kennedy debate on those political cable channel, or check youtube. It is awesome. Two intelligent candidates intelligently and substantively debating issues. We haven't seen that in a while, and it doesn't seem like we'll being seeing that any time soon either.