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

Outdated business model cramping your style?

[djasbestos]

...make it the law!

Re:Outdated business model cramping your style?

[Technician]

The one that got me was this one...

I open a store and say "Come on in and pay whatever you want." Are you on f---ing crack? Do you really believe that's a business model that works?

Movies came to the home market at $65 to $160 each. Piracy was a problem even though a blank T120 VHS tape sold for $15 - $20 each. I know, been there and done that. CD's on the other hand have added rootkits and DRM to make them incompatible with your playback equipment (iPod) by trying to prevent ripping. At the time I can buy full length movies at 2 for $20 or 4 for $20 in the pre viewed section at Blockbuster, many CDs are still less than an hour in length and are over $10 each. They are often not marked that they contain defective by design problems. Movies have THX certification for quality assurance of both the video and audio quality. CDs on the other hand are engineered to compete in the loudness war at the expense of dynamic range and harmonic distortion (Clipping).

Go a head and open a store. Provide in inferior product that won't play on my portable MP3 player for an extreme price and tell me again how this business model works? I buy movies instead.

I can buy oldies (movies) at Wal*Mart for 5.99. Try to find any good 20 year old Kiss, Pink Floyd, Styx, Queen, etc for 5.99 that hasn't been compressed.

Re:Outdated business model cramping your style?

[GodWasAnAlien]

He is talking about obsolete business models.

Say it's 1403, and you form an association that collaborates, organizes and controls all written documents. You call it the "Stationers Company/Guild".

Then decades later, in 1436 or so, someone invents a printing press, and it makes it easier printing documents with much less effort.

At first, you market the quality of hand printed works. Later you buy some of these machines, print documents cheaper, but try to keep control.

But at the end of the early to mid 1500's there are too many other groups that have the printing machines, and the control of your company is dwindling.

So the obvious thing to do? Use the money that you have, to buy some government. So in 1557, the government gives you a royal charter, a monopoly for all printing. You milk that for as long as you can (for 130 years it that case).

Now fast forward to the 20th century.
Your MPAA or RIAA has pretty tight control of the production and distribution of movies and music. Printing high quality records and film is an expensive business to get into, so it is natural for large company control.

Then this thing called the Internet is invented. A media production and distribution middle man no longer is necessary. Things like mp3.com and napster pop up, and information is flowing, uncontrolled.

Well, it this case, we repeat the methods of the Stationers. Buy some government. In addition to lawsuits based on already purchased copyright monopolies, we buy a copyright extension, buy a new DMCA law to protect our new DRM encryption scheme, and buy laws to increase penalties for those damn college students who refuse to allow us to have the control we had before the internet.

Re:Outdated business model cramping your style?

[cliffski]

fuck big business. Anyone can set up a website NOW and sell anything they want NOW at any price. I KNOW this because that is exactly what I do. And the one group in society that makes this hard is the people who pirate the stuff. Seriously, I get no grief from big business at all. nobody stops me doing the little company thing. the biggest problem I have is people who take the stuff for free. ironically in the name of 'sticking it to teh man'.

Stop trying to turn this into a 'poor fileshareers vs evil big business' debate. You advocate the little guy making his own content and making a living from it right? So why the fuck is it still ok to steal the content made by the little guy? How many torrent sites check each submission and go "heck this is a small, customer-friendly and innovative small business, methinks we should not torrent their content".

If you REALLY wanted to get back at the RIAA you would BUY music direct from non-RIAA artists. the same goes for games, movies etc etc. But I'm guessing like 99% of anti-RIAA campaigners, your 'solution' is to just still consume the same content made by the big businesses you hate, but to steal it.
You are changing *nothing* by doing that. You will NEVER change a market to which you have made yourself invisible.

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.

Re:I have another bill that should be passed

[cliffski]

actually the reason that britney and the backstreet boys are on TV and you don't like them is that they sell records. If you pirate music, you are invisible to the market, and your purchasing decision doesn't register. The record execs don't sign bands that they think people like, the sign bands that make money.
You could have some cool indie band that was massively popular amongst the slashdot reading demographic, but they will never get a record deal or national tour sponsored, because they do not generate money.
Removing yourself from the marketplace for music means losing any influence whatsoever on the supply side decisions. Money talks.

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"

Homer

[_Shorty-dammit]

Every time I see another MPAA/RIAA story I can't help but picture Homer Simpson singing "I am so smart! I am so smart! S-M-R-T! I mean, S-M-A-R-T!" as he burns his house down.

non-broken link to the text

[theMerovingian]

here

Also note the status of the bill, it has just been introduced.

Send a message to the constituents of the proposer

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

Here are the emails for the county officials and city council for the largest cities in George Miller's district. Make sure to send Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) so they might actually read it.

Subject: George Miller hides language in H.R.4137 that would remove federal funding from colleges unable to stop file-sharing

BCC: LDare@cao.cccounty.us, pburk@contracostatv.org, cwamp@contracostatv.org, bkondylis@solanocounty.com, ceward@solanocounty.com, jfsilva@solanocounty.com, mpalmaffy@solanocounty.com, JPSpering@solanocounty.com, sgoerkeshrode@solanocounty.com, cmcook@solanocounty.com, jmvasquez@solanocounty.com, pknelson@solanocounty.com, mjreagan@solanocounty.com, FCZaragoza@SolanoCounty.com, cao-clerk@solanocounty.com, bwagenknecht@co.napa.ca.us, mluce@co.napa.ca.us, ddillon@co.napa.ca.us, bdodd@co.napa.ca.us, hmoskowite@co.napa.ca.us, Diane_Holmes@ci.richmond.ca.us, natbates@comcast.net, tom.butt@intres.com, Lopez.Ludmyrna@comcast.net, johnemarquez@aol.com, elirapty@aol.com, harpreet.sandhu@comcast.net, tony_thurmond@ci.richmond.ca.us, Maria_Viramontes@ci.richmond.ca.us, aevenson@ci.pittsburg.ca.us, mayor@ci.vallejo.ca.us, jdavis@ci.vallejo.ca.us, tpearsall0285@aol.com, sgomes@ci.vallejo.ca.us, tbartee@ci.vallejo.ca.us, hsunga@ci.vallejo.ca.us, garycloutier@sbcglobal.net, citycouncil@ci.concord.ca.us



Dear Sir or Madam,

News source: http://www.news.com/2102-1028_3-6217943.html?tag=st.util.print

Bill source: http://edlabor.house.gov/bills/HEAReauthorizationText.pdf

This is unbelievably unconscionable and corrupt on the part of your elected representative. The MPAA is applauding Rep. George Miller for introducing an anti-piracy bill that threatens the nation's colleges with the loss of $100 Billion a year in federal financial aid, should they fail to have a technology plan to stop illegal file sharing.

The proposal, which is embedded in a 747-page bill, has alarmed university officials. "Such an extraordinarily inappropriate and punitive outcome would result in all students on that campus losing their federal financial aid -- including Pell grants and student loans that are essential to their ability to attend college, advance their education, and acquire the skills necessary to compete in the 21st-century economy," said university officials in a letter to Congress. "Lower-income students, those most in need of federal financial aid, would be harmed most under the entertainment industry's proposal."

Where's the Constitutionality?

[dada21]

I still am trying to figure out how the Supreme Court allows Congress to support, or directly provide, loans at the Federal level for college students. It makes absolutely no sense to me that anyone can find support for money taken from me so that you can get your college education.

My father came to this country penniless, and worked as a waiter to get through college. He didn't have Federal support for college, so upon graduating he had no debt. Today, most of my friends who graduated in 1996-1998 still are paying off their bills, and I'm sure I'm partially paying for some of it through whatever fraudulent taxation system the Feds use to acquire my funds to pay for others.

Can't people see that Federally-financed loans are one of the primary reasons that tuition is so high? Before Federal loans, colleges would loan students their own money (at 1-2% interest) to go to school. The colleges had good reason to keep tuition low since they were taking a risk with their own money. Now we have people paying for college loans until they're 35 -- and those who never went to college and never wanted to are supporting others as well.

Combine that with no Constitutional mandate for regulation of the Internet, or for criminalizing non-physical content sharing, and you have a really hilarious law that would make the Founders roll in their graves non-stop.

This bill is a non-issue. It protects the inherent rights of no individual, but provides subsidies to special interest groups. Where's the Supreme Court when you need them?

Re:Where's the Constitutionality?

[malkavian]

Well, I come from the UK where we used to have completely funded University education by Grants.
Now we have loans, which I consider to be a huge step backwards.

The idea of funding (in the Federal level in the US) is to ensure that if someone proves themself to be extraordinarily bright, the fact that they may not have enough money to attend university should not be a barrier to them receiving a damn good education. The principle behind this is that this bright person may well come up with the solution to a problem that cures cancer, solves the energy problems of the world or some other wonderful thing.
They may also create the next plague, be an evil mastermind or some other thing. But the point is that while they're pursuing their dream, they're quite probably going to be in a highly paid job doing some extremely high brow work. And while they're working, they're getting taxed. And over time this elevated level of tax paid more than pays back the money they were allocated by having their tuition fees paid for.. And all the while potentially helping improve the quality of life for all.

So, I've no problems with grants, or anything else like that which funds education. That's a good use of money that stands an elevated chance of making the world a better place.

Now, to turn round and say "If you don't kow tow to the special interests of a business entity, we'll remove your accreditation to effectively teach people and educate them", what you're essentially saying is that you don't care about the future potential money that may be generated by all the people being taught in the future, especially the very bright, but poorer ones who NEED the funding.
You'd rather hamstring your technological base of the future, and future competitiveness in the world market to satiate the demands of a corporate entity that produces NO technology, merely entertainment (which is fast becoming of questionably value world wide).
This is a very good strategy, long term, to ensure you become a second class country with an inferior technology base. Money in the pockets of a few non-entities at the sacrifice of the progress of all.
Rank blackmail and extortion.

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?

Have another cigar fellas...

[plowboylifestyle]

this room isn't smokey enough. Oh and don't worry about the college kids. As I said before college students are not known for rebelling against draconian measures aimed specifically at them.

So no more common carrier status?

[Entropius]

If universities are doing content filtering to weed out P2P traffic, then they obviously aren't functioning as a common carrier.

Does this make them liable for anything else illegal done with their network? What about the transmission of viruses?

I don't think they want to go this route.

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.

700 pages? F that

[daeg]

A 700 page bill is akin to me doing a 700 file commit to SVN. There's no way in hell any manager should approve that large of a change. Either break it down into 5 page commits as individual pieces that can be debated and passed/rejected one-by-one, or get the fuck out of Congress. They are just giving ammo to non-Democrats. Remember how no one "read" the Patriot Act? This is the same deal.

Passing a bill without reading and understanding it should be treated as treason, plain and simple. Don't like it? Don't run for Congress or don't vote on the bill. Period.

sneaker net

[queequeg1]

I wonder if forcing college kids to use sneaker net will increase or reduce the problem. I have actually become scared by the RIAA's tactics, even though I would occassionally download only a song or two (who wants to pay a $3,000 settlement for downloading a few cheesy 80s tunes). So, to avoid getting caught, I asked a neighbor for a copy of some of his 80s tunes. He brought over an external hard drive with everything he has, totalling over 700GB (more than 17,000 flac files). Too many to go through before giving the drive back so I just copied the entire drive. I have since listened to much more than I originally intended to get from my neighbor.

I have to wonder if, given how inexpensive external drives are and how close college students live to one another, forcing people into a mode where the standard is to share thousands (or tens of thousands) of songs in a single transaction is an effective way to reduce piracy. Sure, the number of people who do this might shrink, but the number of songs pirated might go up.

No

[Greyfox]

Don't send a letter. Vote out of office. And the guy you vote in... vote him out of office in the next election, until you find one that doesn't suck corporate cock.

The best way to promote change and make sure your Congressman listens to you over some corporation is to make sure he knows that his job depends on him doing so, and the best way to do that is to demonstrate it by repeatedly swapping congressmen out of office after one term.

Of course, one person alone can't do that much so you might need to band together with likeminded people. Perhaps you should form a PaC. That worked pretty well for the AARP (They all vote, too. That's an important bit.)

Oh, except then you'd be a big corporate interest and your congressman still won't listen to you! Oh... the irony...

College kids aren't the problem

[businessnerd]

Are we seriously still harping on the whole "college kids are the only people who pirate content" issue? Because it's pretty outdated now. That whole trend happened fast and then began to taper off really quick. The reason? Well, when Napster (the real one) hit the scene and blew the p2p doors wide open, not everyone had a broadband connection in their home. Colleges and Universities, on the other hand, had some of the fastest connections around. Broadband was the key here. It may not seem like it nowadays, but mp3's were big. It would take me at least a half hour or more to download one song on my dial-up connection (on a good day), and that was one at a time. At the same time, my older sister, who was in college, could start a download, begin listening to it while it downloads, and the download would finish before she's done listening. Essentially a feux-stream. It wasn't even until a few years later that dsl was available in my area and it was still expensive and unreliable. I had one friend who got it at his house and we pretty much spent all of our spare time over there downloading music and eventually movies, tv shows, and music videos when the p2p clients evolved enough. When we weren't infringing copyright, we were playing online video games like Team Fortress. But this activity was isolated to only this kids house. When we weren't there, we could not do these things because no one else had broadband. Then I went to college. All of a sudden, me and a good 75% of the rest of the freshman population had 24hr access to high speed internet for the first time. We all had something downloading at all times. Not because we wanted to deliberately rip off the music and movie industry, but just because we could. It's like when you get your driver's license. You may not have anywhere to go, but you'll go out for a drive anyway. Just because you can. Anyhow, soon the residential broadband market caught up. Cable internet was more affordable, DSL was more widely available and much more reliable (I know Verizon improved the DSL scene in my area greatly). So now it wasn't just the college kids who had unlimited access to all of the content they wanted for free. Furthermore, the college networks are no longer the fastest out there. Technology improved, but also the college networks were choked with all of the massive downloading (damn tubes!).

So where are we now? Well, everyone, college and non-college folk alike, have the same unfettered access to p2p technology. What they decide to do with that technology is not determined by whether they are on a college campus or not. In fact, once that initial hype over being able to download anything in seconds subsided, I became much more selective about what I downloaded. This was the case with many people I knew. After a while, you start to ask yourself, "Do I really NEED to download this?" where before it didn't matter if you needed to, you just did anyway, because you could. At the same time, the **AA was rattling their sabers over lawsuits and iTunes hit a level of maturity. People began go legit in droves. So is college any different than anyone else?

So some may argue that college campuses do a lot of incestuous p2p sharing. Where someone sets up a Direct Connect server and the massive student population just shares among themselves. Well yes this happens, but it's not as widespread as you may think. First and foremost, this activity violates many schools network use policies. P2p servers are also easy to spot because you notice 90% of the schools bandwidth is being taken up by a single ip address on the third floor of a dormitory. This means that a p2p server will not last long, as the IT department will either block the traffic or just outright revoke that individuals internet privileges. Even early on when p2p hit big, a lot of schools banned p2p apps from their networks. This was usually a futile effort because once a new app came out, everyone jumped on the new one and the game of cat and mouse began.

O