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 Of course, an amendment that would have clarified that was withdrawn immediately after it was offered."

Comments

bad summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the bill itself:

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

The relevant section:

(a) DISCLOSURE OF POLICIES AND SANCTIONS RE-
LATED TO COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT.--Section
485(a)(1) (20 U.S.C. 1092(a)(1)) is amended--
        (1) by striking ``and'' at the end of subpara-
    graph (N);
        (2) by striking the period at the end of sub-
    paragraph (O) and inserting ``: and'' ; and
        (3) by adding at the end the following new sub-
    paragraph:
              ``(P) institutional policies and sanctions re-
        lated to copyright infringement, including--
                  ``(i) an annual disclosure that explic-
              itly informs students that unauthorized
distribution of copyrighted material, in-
cluding unauthorized peer-to-peer file shar-
ing, may subject the students to civil and
criminal liabilities;
      ``(ii) a summary of the penalties for
violation of Federal copyright laws;
      ``(iii) a description of the institution's
policies with respect to unauthorized peer-
to-peer file sharing, including disciplinary
actions that are taken against students
who engage in unauthorized distribution of
copyrighted materials using the institu-
tion's information technology system; and
      ``(iv) a description of actions that the
institution takes to prevent and detect un-
authorized distribution of copyrighted ma-
terial on the institution's information tech-
nology system.''.

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.

Here is some Clarification

[Bimo_Dude]

Looking at the text of the bill, it doesn't appear as though the institutions actually have to block p2p, but they "shall" [Must] develop a plans to explore options.

FTB:

SEC. 494. CAMPUS-BASED DIGITAL THEFT PREVENTION.

(a) In General- Each eligible institution participating in any program under this title shall to the extent practicable--
(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); and
(2) develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.

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.

Err, you may not remember the prior story...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What's needed for this madness to stop

[Palpitations]

Yeah blizzard uses a patcher that functions much like BitTorrent. It is BitTorrent, with HTTP to fall back on if needed. The patch downloader is a BT client with the .torrent file built in. It's trivial to extract the .torrent and use a client of your choice - and in my experience I get much better download speeds as well (see this (BASH) or this (perl) or this (python) or this (Win executable) for examples).

Re:Free speech considerations....

[Catbeller]

"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?"

Not this SCOTUS. Bush loaded that quite well with pro-business judges. Young ones, too, so they'll be a probem for a half century or even more. Do not look for relief from the Imaginary Property crowd from those five. Reference Lawrence Lessig's noble attempt to void the 100+ year copyright by pointing out it was effectively eternal and thus violating the Constitution's design to release works into the public domain. The court's majority - not just Bushies, either -- stated that since the 100 years was a finite time period, the lockup was not technically eternal thus not violating the concept of release to the public domain. The sane counter that in 100 years time our descendants would not even understand what public domain was anymore, or that the future law would simply add another 100+ years, was lost on their ears. They are pro-business and pro-Imaginary Property.