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."

Comments

At my university...

[snl2587]

they do this already, and for the most part are very good at it (Limewire and the like can't be used without the user's internet being disconnected).

Of course, many of the people I know simple use uTorrent. So yeah, the legislation won't do much of anything but deny universities money when the US is already lagging worldwide.

Re:At my university...

[thegrassyknowl]

It seems to me that the US Government and many others are focusing on this new-fangled Internet thing because it's a haven for people who pirate music, share terrorist plans and do all sorts of other nasty stuff (like free exchange of ideas). Do they think about anything else?

When will they realise they can't filter the Internet without removing access to all-but one protocol (port) and even then the filters are doomed to failure. Without blocking all other access people will just sidestep the filter and use open relays, proxies and networks like Tor.

They can't possibly hope to analyse all traffic that flows either. The computation power alone would be unfeasible and the amount of false positives would be too high that there'd be a revolt against it.

*grumbles* Instead of finding new and expensive ways of "fixing" the Internet why don't they just fix the copyright, IP and other laws.

Sneaker-net

[glindsey]

Are they going to search every kid's locker and backpack for USB sticks, micro SD-cards, and plain old external hard drive enclosures? From what I've heard, good old sneaker-net is still a common way for kids to exchange movies, songs, games... if they crack down on the net, kids will just resort to physical trading more often.

Re:Ah Good

[MightyMartian]

Even if it were a serious statement, this is nothing more than an arm's race, and an arm's race that's the state's (or university's) to lose. Ban encrypted traffic, someone figures out how to disguise it. Figure out how to recognize that, someone comes along and does one better.