Slashdot Mirror
College Funding Bill Passes House, P2P Provision Intact
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Ars Technica is reporting that the College Opportunity and Affordability Act passed through the House today with a vote of 354-58 and the anti-P2P provision is intact. That provision would require universities to filter P2P and to offer legal alternatives. They are claiming now, though, that universities would not lose federal funding if they fail to do this. Of course, an amendment that would have clarified that was withdrawn immediately after it was offered."
Leaving things as they are will make (more) millions for (more) lawyers. So the government funded/susidized universities will be using gov't funds to fight the RIAA, and the RIAA will pay expensive legal bills to make sure they keep those "unrealized profits" as low as possible. Maybe one day they will wake up and...bleh, I am so sick of this argument.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Can someone clarify whether the bill proposes that all P2P traffic be prohibited or just that which the school can identify as illegal?
Our young adults are learning an important lesson - money talks.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Colleges are for education, not filling your ipod with illegally downloaded music. Any students who think this is the most important issue in education are sadly ill-informed.
Cue rants about corruption, stupid politicians, the MAFIAA, etc.
We need to find a way to make P2P distribution models legitimately profitable for the corporations that lobby in Washington for these asinine laws. I was under the impression that the Warcraft folks already had some kind of a P2P model going for distributing their patches and suchlike--perhaps other companies could be induced to do the same?
Elsewise, it might become very popular and profitable to set up some kind of P2P-friendly VPN service, with endpoints just outside the DMZ of various college networks...
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Hands up all who are surprised and shocked. Hokay, slap yourself in the face nooby. My goodness delilah, I cannot believe you actually put up your hand! Are you so attention starved that you would willingly humiliate yourself in front of EVERYBODY in a manner that is as degrading as that!? Now stop staring at me with those fish eyes of yours and go uninstall all those supposed "legal" computer software that is crawling through that porn infested pile of junk you call a PC. Do you really think you'll be a programmer one day? *storms off in a huff* /cox rant...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
This should make for some interesting drama over the next year. I wonder what Harvard, which RIAA appears to be avoiding wrt lawsuits, will do about this bit of legislation if it becomes law?
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
What matters is the worst possible case scenario for how a law could be interpreted, and how the scope of the law could creep. DMCA, Patriot[sic] Act, Commerce Clause, etc...
In this case: even if the removal of funding doesn't occur immediately, if it is in the law it will most likely be used.
When was the last time that the government said "no, I don't need more power"?
A few major ones are Prohibition and the 55 MPH speed limit
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I find many students to be very hypocritical. They'll rant and rave how buying music makes them poor, then they'll go out and literally spend $1000 on video games. I've seen some students which the shelf is full of video game boxes.
I think this is a push in the right direction, even though its horribly wrong the way it was pushed through via the bill.
http://edlabor.house.gov/bills/HEAReauthorizationText.pdf
The relevant section: which is a patch to this.
Looks like it simply means that the institution must disclose the policies etc. So they could simply say "we're doing nothing" and comply with the law.
OK, here we go...
step one: blocking...
make some ACLs and throw them on your firewall to block the most-used bittorrent, emule, etc. ports. You are now taking steps to block p2p traffic.
step two: provide a legal alternative
I've got your compliance right here!
Since P2P filesharing is legal (though sharing particular files may not be), and there are no other alternatives with the same features, this seems to be nonsense.
I wonder if the idiots that thought they could effectively block P2P have a brain?
If you block it, it will find a way around you one way or another. You could run P2P over DNS if you wanted to. Once that happens, 2 choices, break the law or cut the universities off the internet.
Can the universities send the RIAA the bill?
Politicians took a look at the name of the bill and realized they couldn't vote against it no matter what it said.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
to name something the exact opposite of what it is.
Opportunity and affordability my ass
Anyone else besides me think the SCOTUS would wipe that particular provision off the books the moment that Harvard, Yale, et. al go to war with the RIAA? Hint: those two schools alone have more legal ability backing them and all the financial resources required to go to legally go to war, and in fact, more than all the RIAA companies combined. Not to mention that the RIAA really really really doesn't want to piss of Stanford, because the majority of the RIAA companies are in California, and it's not that far a drive from Stanford to any State court where they would choose to go to war themselves.
My question is, why aren't our congressmen and women smart enough to vote that particular piece of junk OUT of the bill?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
A lot of schools already block P2P anyway because they only have so much bandwidth to go around, and educational use of it comes first. What's really going to change?
Dear Slashdot,
Can you help me figure out a way to ply the illegally gotten contents of my hard drive against my almost 10 years old student loan? I would have pirated this stuff back then, if I could have...
Thanks!
Off-campus housing is going to triple in price. (Fortunately I've already signed my lease for next year)
I know I'm going to get modded to hell for this, but: if you're in college, you should be studying - not leeching from TPB.
:)
Note: ebooks don't count, of course.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
FTB:
See how your representative voted.
Even so... IMHO this still opens the door to more Orwellian legislation, and provides further evidence of how industry pwnes our government.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
Gee what's nonsense about setting up a legal cache?
Back in my day, we walked bare-pegged, uphill both ways, in shattered-glass covered knee deep snow in the desert, to trade 300 lb. boxes of punchcards!
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
You're correct that that's the bill, although there's the question of whether "we plan to do nothing" is actually a plan per the legal meaning of the bill. This includes not only the legal meaning of words (lawyers have Black's Law Dictionary to list the extra meaning of otherwise ordinary words), but the intent of Congress and a number of other things. Clearly, the point of this bill is that universities should have a plan and that that plan should be to stop infringement by students and offer legal P2P alternatives. Moreover, there wouldn't be much point in offering an amendment to clarify it if it was clear, and you can see that one was, in fact, offered. The person who offered it gave an excuse involving their travel schedule en and you'll see that the Ars story links to their prior article. I'm pretty sure that I submitted it to Slashdot, too.
You see, I don't believe in imaginary property.
...is that the schools would be required to promote "legal alternatives" for music to students, i.e. iTunes, Napster and the like. Most universities already monitor their network to curb file sharing. But the university being forced to push commercial services on students is way over the line. These are supposed to be institutions of learning, not free advertising. Now you've got student tuitions and tax dollars being spent on the recording industries PR campaigns. The whole thing makes me sick.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
Guess who voted No from Texas's fourteenth congressional district?
Now we can only hope Bush vetos it by accident...
"We need to find a way..." Who is we?
The RIAA or anyone else is not about to figure out a business model for ME so that I can make lots of money. And I'm NOT willing to prop up the RIAA just so that I can continue to download bittorrents of Linux or other legally distributed copyrighted works. I'll not purchase my freedom by helping a bunch of knot-heads figure out a new reality.
I'll not be extorted!
Interesting. How does that fit into the slashcomplaint that broadband is a monopoly?
"They are just asking for completely decentralized encrypted network. Soon they'll get it."
No, the only thing you're asking for is for Internet access to at worst be taken away completely or at best highly restricted. Being too clever or a rebel just may backfire.
The new "basic" and indispensable appliance, is not it?
Let's see, the "poor" must be able to afford (at somebody else's dime, of course) food, shelter, medical care, a TV, and a car. Now the ability to "share" somebody else's music is also viewed as important by Slashdot's illiberal crowd...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Those of us who want to continue using P2P without having to jump through all sorts of hoops.
And I wouldn't want the RIAA to endorse using it...but I would, for instance, want Sun or IBM or any of the various game manufacturers to distribute their various products on a P2P model.
Actually, minor non-RIAA studios could do well to distribute P2Pwise...the Radiohead experiment has shown that such a thing -can- be popular; perhaps distributing a torrent with the album art and a little nag-document (go HERE to pay us so we can keep doing this!) via P2P channels would work well to circumvent most of the primary 'objections'
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Even if they do block the "wicked p2p" networks (of course they only have a single purpose, piracy), laugh and start up TOR or a SSH proxy and... Move on.
Thank gawd you posted that anonymously, because that's probably the dumbest thing I've read today (and I've been on CNN.com... so yeah)
To banish P2P because it can be used illegally is the first step. Next we will banish government, economics, networking, programming, graphic design and marketing... ok, maybe not marketing (it's mostly harmless), but all the others are dangerous and can make people lose money/power. 10 years and all you'll be able to major in is French and marketing.
Enjoy.
Free speech rights? Look once you get past high school. Higher education becomes a privilege not a right. That means you have to start acting like an adult. Internet access is a privilege and when privileges are abused in our society they are taken away or otherwise restricted. AS for your "but I own the copyright". One no one's stupid. Most of the P2P traffic isn't material owned by either endpoints. Two filehosting is dirt cheap, use it.
>to the extent practicable
Well, funding is pretty tight right now, but as soon as we free up some funds, we'll get right on that.
>(1) make publicly available to their students and employees, the policies and procedures related to the illegal downloading and distribution of copyrighted materials required to be disclosed under section 485(a)(1)(P);
Please refer to page 257 of the Miskatonic U. Freshman Handbook titled, "Distribution of Copyrighted Materials."
>(2) develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property
Excerpt from page 257 of the Miskatonic U. Freshman Handbook titled, "Distribution of Copyrighted Materials": "Students may purchase software at the Campus Bookstore."
>develop...a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.
The President has appointed a Blue-Ribbon committee consisting of faculty, library staff, IT management, alumni, student representatives, and two DJs from the campus radio station to explore such technology-based deterrents. We anticipate that the first meeting of the committee will be held any day now.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Please do not allow the RIAA to bully you into promoting their affiliated eStores (e.g. iTunes) on your campuses. In order to provide legal alternatives, please work with smaller entities or even free services to grow and promote them and firmly raise your finger to those who buy our politicians and make our children targets for litigation.
They want the colleges to make deals with them to sell DRM'd music. The students would lose access to it after college (unless they buy it again or break the DRM), and the RIAA would get paid for it whether or not the students used it.
Okay, so it's not the RIAA itself selling it, it's their partners, but the RIAA would still make money and I think you get the idea here.
The part about filtering P2P is disturbing but there's are plenty of good legal alternatives to RIAA crap. I'd love to see every university mirror the Internet Archive, Creative Commons and promote work from people in their community. Let's take that part of this stupid law and make something cool that will continue to bleed the RIAA out of existence.
Looks like the first three have failed. People have spoken out, to no avail. Our elected legislators do nothing to help the people. People are capitulating and settling left and right because they can't afford to get to a jury.
Save the country, shoot an RIAA lawyer.
Once a few of them meet a pissed off, heavily armed citizen, maybe they will think twice about threatening to destroy people's lives.
This doesn't change anything really - colleges have been acting as an enforcement arm for the RIAA for years now. Here at RIT they've almost admitted as much - students are told straight up that RIT will give the RIAA the names of anyone they ask for, no subpoena or court action required. It's hard to blame the colleges themselves though, when the RIAA has the FBI and DOJ their enforcing too.
College Opportunity and Affordability Act? The bill requires universities to filter P2P. The universities will have to pay to do that/set that up. Guess who gets the bill for that? The students.
Thus continues the fine tradition of bills such as CAN-SPAM or PATRIOT act, that actually do the opposite of the title. Freedom is slavery, war is peace, yadda, yadda, yadda.
I was unaware that P2P is illegal. What law am I violating when I download Linux ISO via bittorrent? Or use World of Warcraft's built-in torrent system to download updates to my game?
And the Bush restrictions are out the window once he's President, along with $4000 a year for college students who sign up to work in hospitals or the peace corps.
So I wouldn't worry about the privacy restrictions being in effect for very long.
Think someone may have YouTubed it - I was there for three hours and just got back.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Remember this, the next time you advocate government "helping" things by funding them. If a special interest has an axe to grind, a congressman or senator who is not accountable to you (best case: accountable to citizes in another state, worst case: accountable to the industries who fund him) will impose weird conditions for the money, and it will effect your life. You can violate the conditions and opt-out of the money, but the people of your state don't have the option of opting out of the federal taxes whence the funding came. Still want public education? You can still have it: you just have to pay for it twice.
Biotech? Sorry, only if nobody at the institution uses embryonic stem cells. Astronomy? Only if you don't publish anything that mentions Earth's weather. Education? Don't get me started. Oh, I guess this story is one of the numerous examples.
You'll know a true "science president" or "education president" when you see him. He'll be the one running on the platform of slashing all the funding, and vetoing the seemingly-pro-education bills. He'll say, "I will protect your education budget from those who aren't accountable to you." Let the state taxpayers keep that money in their state, and decide for themselves how they'll use it. That way, if industry buys some people in the next state over, at least you will still have a chance to get what you want.
Move the power to as close to home as possible, and it gets that much harder to pull bullshit like this.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
So this must mean that every university that would be subject to the proposed law [i]also[/i] receives more funds to purchase equipment and software that will allow for the traffic shaping, monitoring, and filtering that the bill requires? OK, well at least the universities will receive more money to hire out IT professionals who can aid in such an onerous task?
What's that? No? Oh, I see...
At least the title of the bill sounds uplifting, right? The "College Opportunity and Affordability Act"--you can't go wrong there! It's not like this congress has a history of giving disastrous educational reform legislation an upbeat name.
If a University or College did block all P2P traffic (as opposed to blocking just traffic that they could prove beyond a reasonable doubt was infringing a specific copyright holder's copyrights), I think it would be easy to make an argument that such action is unconstitutional.
.in other words, speech. OpenOffice.org is speach, for example, and is legally distributed via P2P networks. Same for many Linux distros and other Free/Open Source software. If my P2P connection to download Open Source software was blocked, that would amount to illegal censorship. Theoretically, someone could also use P2P technology to distribute Audio or Video blogs or other 'journalism', so that could then be a violation of freedom of the press.
Copyright, by it's very nature, only protects that which is an embodiment of a creative idea. .
So the MPAA lied and said 44% of damages from illegal movie downloading is caused by collage kids, says that for 2 years, then tells everyone due to "human error", it's more like 15%. Now they pass this bullshit legislation that will, yet again, destroy the rights and civil liberities of collage kids. Will someone get these dreaded 4 letter industry lobbyist organizations out of the picture?
That'd be easy to take care of: per-student bandwidth limits (say, 10 GB/month). Large enough for most legitimate purposes. Small enough to curb most serious P2P-ers
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
no, just you.
Funny. Mine keeps saying "goodbye". What does yours say?
... Also known as the COAA.
Yet another damn *AA..
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
who is the idiot with that terrible stupid brain-washing nick? (i dont believe in blah blah...)
Is it possible that guy want us to believe only in the "material" property? and not in the magic imaginary one?
the number of times that guy is taken into account for showing his stories is disturbing.
and the fact many of us DO believe in imaginary property.
misleading nick is what i call for him.
Oh! I have an awesome idea! I am going to hire a ton of lobbyists and get them to petition the house to pass a bill making it mandatory for all members of government to wear hot pink sweat pants. I wonder if this would actually work, considering the success of lobbyists in other campaigns...
At my university, all outbound ports except port 80 and port 443 are blocked. They make you register your MAC so your activity can be traced. When I asked IT why this was, they said that it was to make sure the network was for use for "educational purposes only".
Of course, it doesn't affect me much, I can tunnel my connections over ssh to my home computer. However, most other students can't even get their IM clients to work on the network.
I'm sure that this type of policy will become much more commonplace if this bill passes.
eh?
Just like any other bittorrent client, it only shares when it is running. So when you are getting the patch, it shares out as well. When you apply the patch and launch the game, it shuts down. As for the background downloader, the user sets how it works. The possible settings are: only when I play the game, only when I don't play the game, all the time, and never.
Yet again another potentially stupid piece of legisation gets passed 35x to 5x.
I'm not sure if this is just coincidence or if there are only 50 to 60 congressmen that *aren't* in the pocket of the RIAA/MPAA/whoever and vote for what they know is best for their constituents.
Or to put it differently, the competancy rate of congress seems to be around 1 in 8 or 12.5%.
The top universities don't need funding, anyway. Harvard, for example, has so much in endowments that they could permanently stop charging tuition without putting a dent in their mountain of money. I'd love to see something like that. A top university that didn't care about your money. They could concentrate on what they "say" is all that is important, the prospective students qualifications. So a brilliant but poor black kid from the ghetto would truly have a leg up on some mediocre rich white kid. It's never going to happen, though. Congress has threatened to get involved if universities don't spend at least 5% of the endowments to lower tuition, but it's an idle threat. Way too many congress-critters have close ties with those universities.
-- Will program for bandwidth
My band plans to do exactly that whenever we end up finishing our first album.
The goal is to get p2p criminalized outright, and they gotta start somewhere. Start with easy extortion and get the next generation used to it, then slowly raise the bar.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is yet another reason to boycott RIAA artists. Completely.
Shut off televisions or radios that have RIAA music playing. Whenever you stumble across them promoting a RIAA musician online, and you have an opportunity to 'rate' it, give it the lowest rating. Support independent artists. Purchase music from them. Call up/email corporate radio stations and request independent musicians, knowing full well they're not going to play them. Help to get www.riaaradar.com to a point where it's accurate enough to be useful in avoiding RIAA artists - send the editor plenty of feedback. (As of right now, it's pretty good, but I wouldn't trust it completely.)
The one thing I would not do is hack the RIAA website. Yes - we all laugh and cheer like schoolboys when somebody does it, but in the long run, it probably isn't going to have any positive results.
But have we really tried it? It seems all great revolutions in the past involve a little murder..
while we try to hold on to high ideals and set standards, sometimes the old ways are the best.
What's with all the buzz about the RIAA tracking P2P users for illegal music downloading? I thought most of us were extracting music from websites like imeem.com. Fast load, no ads, preview songs, not to mention the RIAA could never catch you this way...I think that would make a great alternative for colleges to offer p2p users ^^
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
Having friends saved money back then, at least that's one way to distribute the cost since no one person needed to have a big collection. Maybe different people bringing different albums to the house of the person with the best stereo where they'd listen wasn't justified either?
.mp3s, massive capacity HDDs, fast networks, or portable mp3 players) the same also applied. I'm sure I'm not the only one who knew of someone who'd happily make a free copy of such-and-such CD if you brought some other desirable CD to be copied at the time. The only difference P2P made is that you didn't have to go running around or know anyone with such-and-such for that particular service.
You must not have known anyone that recorded off the air, made tape copies, or mix tapes. I'm pretty sure cassette tapes didn't wreck the industry, even though such practices were more common than what you seemingly believe. Also back in the early days of CD-burners (before
Only thing killing P2P might do (if possible) is to give some people a good excuse to socialize in person. (Reversion back to sneakernet, more or less.) Whether or not that's a good or bad thing probably depends on how you look at it.
Also in a campus environment I wouldn't be too suprised to see a wireless drop-box model of P2P appear. (If not common already.) Someone could have a drive server on wifi that's not connected to any other network. People with the right password, SSID, etc. could take and leave what they'd want, provided they're in range. Unless an insider snitches or brags of it, odds are good that anybody else would be none the wiser.
Ask them to prove that there will be human life in 100 years time. If it's not proveable, then it IS infinite. Society will end before copyright end to enrich it.