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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 Of course, an amendment that would have clarified that was withdrawn immediately after it was offered."
Our young adults are learning an important lesson - money talks.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
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
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.
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.
Yes, clearly these are the same people complaining about not being able to afford music. Bravo.
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...
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)
It also comes down to value for the dollar. A student can get much more entertainment value out of a $60 game than out of 4 music CDs.
The fact of the matter is, music has COMPETITION. The days of the $12 CD making sense are long, long gone. People aren't sitting around hoarding their money. No, they spend it on *other entertainment products* such as DVDs and video games. Look at how CD sales have dropped and how DVD/VG sales have risen over the past few years. To call it hypocrisy is BEYOND STUPID. You would have to stone cold batcrap bonkers to not realize it's a matter of the music industry being unable to compete for the entertainment dollars of its demographic.
And yes, buying music like that would indeed make someone poor, or at least *feel* poor, because it is a POOR FINANCIAL CHOICE in the face of what the competition is offering. A movie costs as much as, or less, than its soundtrack much of the time. A game can offer a dorm's entire floor hours of entertainment and the game industry THRIVES on that, whereas the music industry does what it can to make sure that if a dorm's entire floor is to enjoy hours of music, it will cost not $60 but far more, trying their best to tie it not only to an individual, but to a particular device that individual owns.
I don't even know why I'm taking the time to post this reply; if you had the intellectual capacity of a dixie cup you would have the sense to not post what you did.
I like basketball!!1!
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.
I don't think it is that absurd for a college CS major to be downloading a linux ISO from bittorrent. I don't mind Universities helping copyright holders protect their works, but denying all P2P traffic is a ham-fisted way of doing it. If they want to filter based on content, that's fine, but even that isn't fool-proof. You have to be very careful in how you legislate this because its people who can't afford to go to college without university support that are going to be paying the price.
I think examples such as the DMCA should make us wary of how well-intentioned legislation can go wrong when you have technologically illiterate politicians guided by industry lobbyists doing the writing.
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.
Regretably, some students treat it like a large lavatory, especially after the beer part is factored in.
Now now. Here at slashdot we have balanced discussion where most people read the articles, keep the discussions on topic and don't bring up stupid 'memes' (that they think are clever).
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
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?
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 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?