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Proposed Bill in Tennessee Penalizes Schools for Allowing Piracy
An anonymous reader brings us an Ars Technica report about a proposed bill in Tennessee which would require state-funded universities to enforce anti-piracy standards. The universities would be forced to "track down and stop infringing activity" or risk losing their funding. The U.S. Congress requested last year that certain universities do this voluntarily. Quoting:
"Efforts taken by universities thus far to deter and prevent piracy have had mixed results. The University of Utah, for instance, claims that it has reduced MPAA and RIAA complaints by 90 percent and saved $1.2 million in bandwidth costs by instituting anti-piracy filtering mechanisms. However, the school revealed that their filtering system hasn't been able to stop encrypted P2P traffic and noted that students will find ways to circumvent any system. The end result, some say, will be a costly arms race as students perpetually work to circumvent anti-piracy systems put in place by universities."
I agree with the sentiment that universities (and the tax payers) not fund networks that won't be used properly. I realize that a lot of people do use the networks for perfectly valid uses, according to the evidence the bulk of traffic on educational networks is not legitimate (legitimate being for the purposes of education or legal personal uses.)
However it should be noted that ISPs are not common carriers.
The amazing thing is that many students are learning occupations that are dependent on IP and yet continue to ignore it. I wonder who they expect to provide them a paycheck once they become producers? Or would they rather go the inefficient route of millions of one-offs?