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"