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Colleges Risk Losing Federal Funding If They Don't Fight Piracy
crimeandpunishment writes
"The US government is making colleges and universities join in the fight against digital piracy by threatening to pull federal funding. Beginning this month, a provision of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 requires colleges to have plans to combat unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials on their networks. Colleges that don't do enough could lose their eligibility for federal student aid. 'Their options include taking steps to limit how much bandwidth can be consumed by peer-to-peer networking, monitoring traffic, using a commercial product to reduce or block illegal file sharing or "vigorously" responding to copyright infringement notices from copyright holders.'"
This is bullshit
All get together and agree to do nothing. Watch as the government doesn't withdraw federal funding for all schools.
But even doing that can cost alot just for the hard where.
It IS college. You're supposed to learn crap, not leech crap. I learned that the hard way in high school...
What gets me is why people want these crappy new songs and movies and would risk institutions' reputations to reach them.
But even doing that can cost alot just for the hard where.
The 'hard' is where? And why does it cost so much?
You didn't think you'd walk away from that did ya?
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
You're going to school to study, presumably.
I guess this is the answer to all of those people who always ask "Won't they ever learn?"... Those who can't do.. teach.
As weird as this seems, the use of an external entity by a college or university to run their network might be a bypass to these requirements. The external entity would be responsible for the public computer labs and networks in the dorms, and would operate as a standalone ISP. This would put the network firmly in the hands of DMCA safe harbor provisions.
The school could then operate their own network for teachers and approved research departments (possibly tunneling over the ISP's network between buildings, etc), and would allow the school to put in a firewall between the two networks and wash their hands of this sillyness.
But even doing that can cost alot just for the hard where.
The 'hard' is where? And why does it cost so much?
You didn't think you'd walk away from that did ya?
I think the where is hard...I'm confused about the denomination 'alot.'
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
seems to me like a lucrative opportunity for delivering some checkmark software solutions at discount price.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Our university (in South Africa, lets not name names) will disconnect anyone caught using any "peer to peer"* software.
* I'm not implying that the IT department actually KNOWS that p2p != file sharing.
Simply and directly pass all the costs off to the students. Tally up what all the hardware and maintenance will cost, the hiring of new staff to deal with it, etc. Make it a distinct line item highlighted in the costs. During orientation let students and parents know why it is there and what it is for, and helpfully provide them with congress critter contact info.
I have a feeling that if parents started getting charged a $100/semester "anti-piracy fee" they'd be none too happy and more than a few would call up and scream at their reps.
Remember that all the payouts and favours and such that Hollywood hands out to politicians are useful to them right up until the public gets mad and it'll cost votes. The second that happens, the politicians will forget all loyalties to them and vote as told, because what they REALLY like are the perks and power that come with being in office.
Special interest groups that toss around lots of money get their way because the money is useful in getting elected and the perks are nice. However they get ignored when public opinion is massively against them.
In all fairness, they only have to come up with a PLAN to combat piracy. There are no performance targets to meet as to whether or not the plan will actually DO anything. Just another lip service campaign.
I can't wait for the day when the government is allowed to regulate internet traffic through "net neutrality" legislation. I'm sure the RIAA and MPAA won't lobby politicians to police torrent traffic. Governments are never corrupt! Nothing could possibly go wrong, and this story isn't a shining example of the government's surplus of power.
Not Bloody Likely. Motivated students, and trust me they ARE motivated, are far more effective than the MAFIAA leaning on the government leaning on schools.
I'm currently enrolled in a small technical university in the Southeast. A couple months ago, the entire student body was sent an email from the IT department saying that due to external pressures, the school would be complying completely with any requests for information concerning pirating, with groups such as the RIAA being the ones requesting.
We were never given an actual reason for the new policies, reporting, and data collection (the IT department would now be tracking and recording all P2P traffic on school networks), but there was certainly speculation about something like this.
My computer ethics course became much more interesting that semester.
I'd simply pick the "or" option...
"or "vigorously" responding to copyright infringement notices from copyright holders.'"
That's already required by the DMCA... seems like this is pretty easy to me... (pick the "or" option).
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
... Once upon a time they drilled into our heads the concept that one cannot take justice in his own hands or do what is the police's business. Now everybody is expected to be an unpaid and unbadged cop in service of the almighty corporations. We're expected to serve the interests of the media mafia, or else.
Well, if they want to pay mafioso, it's a multiplayer game. Once their mighty corporate heads start getting targeted, they might want to change their tune.
Capisce?
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
So all a college has to do is tell the government they are fighting piracy and all is well. I doubt the government has anybody who would be able to prove that they are not fighting piracy. This is the same government that let Madolff run a multi billion dollar ponzi scheme for years because the SEC didn't have people who understand how the economy works.
Recent grad here. Our university has a closed network where each person has a unique IP. All the MPAA has to do is send the college an e-mail about it and your access is shut down and you have to write this really long letter about how sorry you are that you did that before they turn your internet back on again. Sometimes that's not enough. Apparently for a while RIAA was having some kids settling out of court for thousands of dollars. The MPAA and RIAA know colleges are an easy target because they have a much higher success rate of finding out exactly who was on the other end of that torrent.
On every campus I've been to (though there are ones this is not the case for) network access is provided by the campus through their network. It is non-competitive, you have no option but to use it, 3rd parties are not allowed in.
I see college campuses spinning off dormitories to legally independent entities, and not allowing them on the wired campus Internet or allowing official hot-spots in the dorms to be on the campus network.
Access to campus resources would be through VPN.
Then if the campus network didn't "properly" follow the rules the college would be off the hook.
The ultimate end-game of this strategy is to sell all dormitory buildings to private investors. No court in the land would hold colleges responsible if private building-owners who happened to offer building-wide network connectivity didn't follow rules that only apply to schools.
Plan B is to yank campus communications entirely from dorms and treat them like apartments, making each dorm room or student contract with a 3rd party provider for such utilities if they want them.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Looking over this largely beneficial legislation, sponsored by all Democrats, it is shameful to see this turd hidden in the fine print of section 493. This is not an amendment slipped in at the last moment. This was by design from the beginning, so kudos to the Ds for upholding the tradition of congress being corporate tools.
I am not surprised, but severely depressed that there is such a soulless and unethical disregard for the well being of this country by all of congress.
Why is it the responsibility of the schools to stop piracy? Why does the government not have sufficient people put in place yet (after like 17 years of the internet) to do real cyber crime investigation? Coming from an engineering background I saw this as an issue many, MANY, years ago. As a side note I recently had a credit card opened in my name and some other stuff done. You want to know what the detective from the local PD did? - nothing!, he took a report and told me I WAS SUPPOSED TO GO TO THE FTC WEBSITE AND FILE A REPORT--IF I WANTED TO. And thanks to this government for all the help in these spammers - which in any other venue would be outright fraud. People trying right out in the open, to steal from you by deception.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Old budget:
$50M in research grants
New budget:
$1M in research grants,
$49M to be spent first for fighting piracy, and anything left can be spent on research grants, but only if your anti-piracy efforts are successful.
That may not be written down anywhere but it's the de facto "funding formula."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So the government / schools have to pay for what's the copyright holder's responsibility?
Fuck them.
My brain leeched a lot of crap in the lecture hall. I had to un-learn it later.
Worse, I paid for the privilege.
Oh wait, I'm confusing the very good college I went to with a certain teacher in K-12 school. My bad. But I'm sure a lot of people leeched crap in post-secondary institution lecture halls.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Its' alittle like "a lot"
now that's funny right they're.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Seeing all the beautiful women at the Lilith Fair is WHERE I get HARD.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
By essentially requiring universities to perform the investigation, response, or protection against piracy, the RIAA and MPAA are receiving a government supplied subsidy. If a thief stole a diamond ring and passed it to a friend who resided in a college dorm, would the jeweler ask the University Housing department to handle the investigation? Shouldn't they be entitled to the same assistance from the federal government? From actual university work experience, the RIAA is a royal pain in the rear. They issue notices and expect the university to determine who broke the law. They expect this service without providing adequate information in many cases. Most universities don't have the human or budgetary resources to spare for this pointless endeavor. There should be a clause in the law to allow the colleges to bill the RIAA/MPAA for time spent on investigative services. At $100 per hour, they might decide it's not worth going after the kid who downloaded Britney Spears latest craptacular single to listen once and then delete it forever.
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. - Albert Einstein
My shoes are soft and I wear them, and I can carry a lot of data quickly if it's in a box full of 1TB hard drives.
Oh, and yes, what passes for a Xerox machine in my dorm really does have two drive connections and a "push to copy" button.
*the above is fictitious but it is based on what really could happen
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
When the weather changes, we don't intimidate mother nature with the threat of nuclear apocalypse to get it to change... we adapt to the situation and find new ways to flourish.
whats happened here is the old corporate imbeciles are so accustomed to using lawyers as a "immune response" to the "plague of piracy" that they really think the law is their panacea to every matter that affects their income.
what happens when the sun flares up and takes out thousands of servers and infrastructure? are we just going to sue the damn sun for damages?
the moral of the story here is like any dolt they're now resorting to bullying their way around to get an answer to the "problem".
And when it comes to piracy, students are the most abundant case overall. a large (more than most care to think) part of it is from the fact that students on average don't even have an income! If they magically cut off the ability to torrent anything illegal over the network, the student masses would simply adapt and find a way to transfer stuff without the network. Waste of time and a sad attempt at a resolution if there ever is one.
you libertarian idiots would be good comic relief if you weren't so dangerously serious with your stupidity
yes: corporations corrupt the government, just as you say
therefore, the job is to remove the corruption from the government, so THE ONLY TOOL YOU HAVE AGAINST CORPORATIONS works better for you. see how that works?
but no. you libertarian retards want to DESTROY government, thereby freeing corporations up from pesky regulations, and able to rape your rights even more than they already do. wtf?
look at your comment, look at your OWN stupid comment: you KNOW that the source of the problem here is a CORPORATE ENTITY. you say so yourself. you see the RIAA and the MPAA puling the strings. you KNOW them to be the source of the problem. you see the corporate entity infecting the government
yet instead of seeing this problem as what it is: an obvious example of corporations abusing power, somehow, magically, in your mind, it becomes an example of GOVERNMENT abuse
HOW DOES THAT WORK IN YOUR DIMWITTED MIND?!
and so you labor to REMOVE THE ONLY ENTITY THAT CAN PROTECT YOU FROM THE CORPORATE ABUSES YOU YOURSELF PERCEIVE
how the FUCK does that happen inside your head?
fact, solid rock of gibraltar fact: if you remove government power, the vacuum is replaced by corporations. an entity that you have no recourse to control and is not beholden to you in any way
fact, solid rock of gibraltar fact: every abuse you see governments doing that you dislike, if the government is whittled down libertarian morons, then the SAME abuses will continue to be committed, but by corporations instead. you do see that simple obvious truth, right?
and then add to that list of abuses you dislike a whole new list of abuses an unregulated, unrestrained corporate entity is now free and happy to inflict on you in their quest for profit at any cost to your liberties
that's the truth. that really is truth
why the FUCK can't you libertarian retards see that?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I may be a bit off here, but I will guess that this move, if it becomes a reality for most, it will have the effect of teaching students how to use encrypted file-sharing protocols. The reason is simple: as a student you don't have much moeny, but plenty of time and lots of friends with the right knowledge. Add it all up and it can really only be one thing...
It is criminal that any one industry can withhold education as they see fit.
The idea that Jane or Jack can't get engineering degrees because somebody downloads Battlefield Earth from a torrent site is disgusting.
I'm a liberal, but I hate how so many Democrats are fully in with the entertainment industry lobbyists. It is disgusting.
It's a simple enough proposition. The government directs you to provide free resources and labor in the form of software security enforcement to the for-profit organization we designate or we cut off your education funding.
What could be the problem with that?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I wish I could start a (questionably legal) racketeering company, then offload all the work onto the government, who in turn demands all these colleges work for me as well. Oh, and foreign governments must join in as well, because USA is #1 and they'll do anything to be on our side.
I'm drafting my business model right now...
1. Convince people they need my service and exploit the shit out of them
2. Hire an army of lawyers
3. Buy as many judges and politicians as I can
4. ?????
5. Profit
It's almost too easy.
for breeding greater industrial strength p2p apps
more obfuscated, more sparse, more steganography, more secure, better hidden...
oh, you thought you were going to stop piracy instead?
you thought you were going to take a bunch of poor, technically astute, media hungry young folk, and get them to go "gee, all this arm twisting... maybe i should spend $200 a month i don't have on the media i want rather than stick it to an authoritarian internet freedom destroying parasitical antiquated UNNECESSARY corporate entity"
yeah, good luck with that RIMPAA
pass all the laws you want. all of them. this is the best you can do? you can't think of something more authoritarian and controlling for the sake of shoehorning yourself into our cultural space? c'mon, you can do better than that! buy some more legislators, hire some more lawyers. be all that you can be! go for the gold!
UNENFORCEABLE
let me repeat that, in case you didn't hear me
UN-EN-FORCE-ABLE
you ignorant, irrelevant pricks
go. snort your last coke off your last hookers' ass
YOU'RE OUT OF BUSINESS
YOU LOSE
BUHBYE
don't let the packet hit you on your ass on the way out the router
fucking parasites
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...hard where.
hard there.
And this news comes just after the announcement of The Pirate party from Swedish? So, how do you suppose to teach/learn/invent something, anything in fact, if you have all that draconian restrictions even in University? What is next, the LIBRARY?
so we need BETTER REGULATIONS
because NO REGULATIONS IS FAR worse
seriously, how stupid can you twatstains be?
do you NOT see that NO regulations means corporations do anything they want?
if you remove government power, can you not see that corporations take over the power vacuum?
why the FUCK can't you see that!!!???
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My university had a very easy way of dealing with this. If you were sharing infringing files over p2p networks, and someone tried went after you, they handed you over to them. p2p filesharing of infringing files on personal computers wasn't allowed.
Of course, the administrators also understood that, for their classes, research, and personal life, students would need to be able to store and transfer large files. If the students wanted to use their own servers for that purpose, it would certainly be an interesting hobby, and should get funding and rack space as a university club. And if those students didn't want administrators looking at the servers, and password-protected the shares on them, it wouldn't really be appropriate for administrators to pry, even if the students gave the passwords to all other students. And if those students regularly transferred several gigabytes of data at a time, they were clearly just being diligent and enthusiastic students.
Almost no one at the university used external P2P networks for illegitimate means... considering that there was the option of using the 100Mbps connection to the outside world, and risking getting caught, or the 1Gbps connection to on-site servers, and not risking anything. And if something wasn't on there, there was this odd tendency for public computers to have utorrent installed, download something, and then suddenly have it deleted after a large transfer to those servers. Of course, the administrators couldn't really do anything about it, since they didn't have cameras in the computer labs or anything, and it only happened once per torrent anyway.
Really, they did everything one could expect them to do to combat p2p filesharing!
In my pants. It costs a lot because im huge.
colleges can outsource student networks (dorm, cafeteria, etc...) to ISP's, and maintain their own in-house networks for things like computing projects, internet2, etc...cost savings and flipping the bird to RIAA controlled legislators is certain to be a win-win.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I'm behind 7 proxies, what do I care?
Obama: Where "Yes we can" means "No you cannot!"
...we have a good guy on our side in the White House. Obama will surely strike this down, pronto.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I couldn't get the software to do what I wanted for a price I wanted to pay so I made it myself.
That works for computer programs but not for, say, musical works. The judicial interpretation of the idea-expression divide (17 USC 102(b)) differs per medium; non-literal copying is more tolerated for software than for music. Case in point: George Harrison heard a song on the radio, then several years later wrote "My Sweet Lord" and accidentally reused the same hook. The original songwriter sued and won a million-dollar judgment. Is that even avoidable?
lame excuses [...] They are not loosing anything when I pirate.
What does Disney lose when I pirate an out-of-print movie? Or what does Capcom lose when I pirate an out-of-print video game?
This rule is about showing valid enforcement not stopping it.
Would keeping logs of compliance with 17 USC 512 count?
"hard where" is a description of what happens when a place or objects or set path in time/space is decided upon. When everyone comes to agreement that the current "where" is assuredly "there", becoming a hard where.
Balderdash!
People can just put their music collection on a thumb drive and pass it around. they can go back to the old days where people would pass pirated stuff around on floppy or tape.
Granted, they have to get that music from the outside world in the first place, but that's one more advantage to living off campus!
This whole thing just plain stinks.
-
If by "a group of people who have the benefit of unlimited time and resources" you mean the industry, you're right.
Check it out: they're winning. And they're winning because there is no meaningful fight going on. Everytime the media mob buys a law or takes down someone the answer is always "someone else will spring up, we'll use encryption" and assorted yadda yadda.
What is happening is that the enemy tanks are in town and everybody is saying "oh, but when our secret weapons will show up we'll prevail" or "oh, doesn't matter, we'll go run into the sewers".
They can - and they will - legislate the Internet into Cable TV 2.0. They will control the ISPs and choke it into braindead status. They have shown the ability to force entire countries into compliance - that's real power. That's what they can do. It's not possible to fight them with law, because it's been bought. It's not possible to fight them with technological resources - their own are limitless. The only thing that is viable is direct action.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
... a small one. Here's what our policy to prevent piracy would have been:
Please don't pirate stuff too much. If we get notices saying that you're pirating stuff and asking you to quit, we'll call you in to the office and give them to you. If we get court orders telling us to give them your name, we'll probably have to do that, since we can't afford lawyers much.
If you really have to pirate stuff, please at least try to leech it off of your friends on the LAN rather than flooding our dinky little Internet uplink. Because if you do that, we'll probably end up blocking your IP address for a while so that email and our Debian updates can get in.
And while you're at it, here's the address of the porn server that some freshman set up. Get your porn over there, please don't mirror all of abbywinters.com over our connection.
At what point will it be so bad, that so many students are getting busted and have to drop out to cover legal fees/expenses because of pirating?
Does anyone have the stats of how many higher learning students have pirated something? Be it music, movies, software etc. Another interesting thing to have is what % of those who do pirate anything have gotten "busted." What about those deterred from pirating because they know someone who has gotten busted?
I think you know where I'm going with this...
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
Someone is really doing something about all the intellectual property thieves! They should all be put in the stocks in the courtyards of their respective colleges and other honest students should throw vegetables and human feces at them. That'll be a collegiate lesson they'll never forget!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Hey all. The government works for us. If this matters to you, put down your roach or logout of your MMORPG, and go vote or run for office. We don't actually have to give the federal government the funding they need, and that they in turn use, to hold us hostage to their demands. We could just vote to cut all that government funding and our taxes, and keep the money. The government is running your life because you give them the money and power (taxes and legislation). Send yourself or someone you believe in to change the government.
MOTIVATED students should get off their lazy hippy butts and stop their whining. Go DO something about it.
Regardless of your belief that you can study fine while downloading stuff, your use of the non-word "irregardless" has shown that your studies were unfruitful.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
That would be my plan. I would design a very expensive plan that involve a lot of new, very expensive, border routers - oh, and a new logging server with failover backup. I think that should be in it's own building offsite - with an OC 3 or perhaps something bigger. Oh, and staffing. I think a crew of 6 for each shift should do it.
I could probably rack up a $2-3M startup costs with $1+M/year operating fee. With my plan ready, I would tell them that I am only waiting for the copyright holders to finance it. What? They don't want to? Sorry, we can't justify spending that kind of money to police civil complaints. Guess we'll just have to follow the DMCA.
Limit bandwidth and use commercial software to cap per-student/per-workstation bandwidth to an amount equivalent to (at most) a fractional T1 (say 512K down 256K up), unless the student has any reason they need more bandwidth @ a workstation to pursue academic interests or personal needs, where they then agree to an additional TOU, and have a face to face discussion with a network administrator, to show they have a legitimate reason, and it's not just to share media files.
If they want to download/upload something very large, at a quick rate, they will have to explain what they want to download that requires extroardinary bandwidth, how it will benefit the student (or the university), how often they will perform downloads, etc.
If it's a one-time event they get some sort of temporary pass on the system (upgrade of their cap that automatically goes away in 24 hours).
If it's not, their usage monitored, and exception revoked if they are deemed to have abused it, but they still have to go to some website and put in a code every 24 hours to "refresh" their exception.
Then set a 'maximum level' as well even in that case (without a documented academic reason for more usage allowance, that specifies when and how the higher usage is needed).
And require any student to have P2P software running on their computer while connected to the campus network fill out a form, first, and an affidavit promising not to intentionally participate in or facilitate any illegal activity.
There are legitimate usages of P2P networks (for example, downloading software distributions). Downloading a Linux ISO should be able to be done occasionally (by the limited number of people who are interested).
It's in university's best interests anyways, to control their networks, since it keeps the bandwidth available on their WAN to be used for legitimate academic purposes.
Prevents wastage of money.
And they don't really have to be the bad guys "searching for copyright offenders and suspending them" that way.
Limiting bandwidth (using technology) is a fairly passive way of preventing using the internet to download/upload copyright DVDs.
They might have to rethink this if WAN bandwidth ever gets a lot cheaper though
First, let's make sure there are no jobs in America for people with advanced degrees.
Second, let's make sure having a Bachelor's degree is meaningless with respect to getting jobs too.
Third, let's take away all the things that make going to college fun.
Boy, this country's going to be a lot of fun in about 20 years...
> Colleges Risk Losing Federal Funding If They Don't Fight Piracy
Yeah. They'd better send some ships to the Somalian coast.
"Under the Higher Education Act of 1965, the Student Assistance General Provisions, the Federal Work-Study (FWS) Programs, the Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education (TEACH) Grant Program, the Federal Pell Grant Program, and the Leveraging Educational Assistance Partnership Program (LEAP) to implement various general and non-loan provisions of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA), as amended by the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HEOA) and other recently enacted legislation. These regulations are effective July 1, 2010."
This is a small sample of the programs affected.
Basically if your school won't play ball, they are dead. This is what they mean by "Big Government".
:q! Oh crap, not again...
I hope my uni doesn't decide online students must have anti-piracy software installed on their computers (far-fetched?), b/c I'd hate to have to buy another one. They already want us to use Windows & MS Office; hell, that's bad enough. Of course, they haven't been able to tell I'm "in violation", e.g., Debian, FF & OO. Fuck 'em anyway. :)
Because if they don't, this is an elitist policy.
If you don't think the government should regulate the information superhighway then perhaps you'd prefer that AT&T and the RIAA regulate it? I'd rather it be the government because we have a history of letting corporations regulate things and they never do a good job.
Wireless is affordable now. The students have to pay for internet one way or another, why not leave the schools out of it? Get a sprint phone, and you have an hub that will support 8 devices for an extra $30 a month.
Corporatists believe the corporations should become the new government. They are actually collectivists. Ayn Rand their philosophical leader called her inner circle the "collective". How can you claim to be for individual liberty if you believe in corporate person hood?
Stop allowing collectivist corporatists pose as libertarians. They don't believe in individual liberty. They believe in corporate government or in the extreme case corporate monarchy which is actually a form of feudalism.
If you haven't figured that out by now maybe you should look at who funded Obama's rise to power.
The thing is, piracy is more versatile than the legitimate internet. In order to put a dent in piracy, you'd have to almost completely destroy the utility of the internet, and the businesses that benefit from the internet (basically all businesses) would be very pissed about that. That said, I support the actions of anyone who feels like blowing up RIAA HQ
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
If you get convicted of a felony via drugs for example, you can not get financial aid.
> Why do the RIAA and MPAA get federal assistance?
They're too big to fail?
Imagine if very large number of people, around the world, refused to buy music, movies, software, or even books (unless required for a class). If such a boycott lasted even a few months, it would have a serious impact.
The MAFIAA would have to be informed of what is going on, and why.
In the end, the MAFIAA would have to back off.
Do these morons know that there is an exemption in the copyright law for EDUCATIONAL purposes?
Another fine example of federalism (i.e. extortion) at work...
Hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil are spewing into the Gulf of Mexico each day, an entire ecology is dying, and these assholes are fucking worried that some moneyless students aren't buying enough Britney Spears.
I haven't seen a decent movie come out in 19 years.
It would be great if the schools responded by setting up a massive file sharing system loaded with public domain, Creative Commons, GPL, and other legal content. There could easily fill it with hundreds of gigs of free legal music. I think pushing free legal non-RIAA music would be an AWESOME way to comply with RIAA demands to combat downloads of their stuff.
Just a few links to get them started:
http://www.dance-industries.com/
http://ccmixter.org/view/media/remix
http://phlow-magazine.com/free-mp3-music-download
http://www.clearbits.net/torrents
http://www.jamendo.com/en/
http://www.archive.org/details/audio
http://newteevee.com/2007/03/03/ten-sites-for-free-and-legal-torrents/
http://newteevee.com/2010/02/05/ten-more-sites-for-free-and-legal-torrents/
and another four or five hundred links:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Directories
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
...while a "-1, Grossly Incorrect" mod seems like it would be a nice thing to have (and would certainly be appropriate for the above comment), "Troll" is not a valid substitute.
Section 493:
That said, language about it has been in there since the very first draft in 2007, Section 485:
The bill's primary sponsor, Rep. George Miller, doesn't appear to get any funding at all from the RIAA/MPAA according to OpenSecrets, so I'm guessing that language was put in place by one of the other 29 cosponsors, or by committee. I'd love to find out where that provision originated.
screw your college buy putting it on boxes everywhere
then all the kids get a free holiday...forever
americans doign the right thing again hashahahsdahah
I know it's cliche, but I have actually had a situation where I needed a Linux ISO ASAP on a college campus. BitTorrent was the fastest way to get it.
Fortunately, Iowa State University's current policy is somewhat sane -- they sent me an email that I should be aware I'm uploading, and did absolutely nothing else.
My guess is that this actually does curb piracy, but it does so without violating net neutrality or hampering legitimate, educational uses. More importantly, that system probably costs them way less to set up and maintain than anything pro-active, as it still lets the MPAA do the heavy-lifting. I assume they'd just pass any letters from the MPAA (including legal action) straight on to me, thus meaning they have no legal liability one way or the other.
This would reverse all of that. It'd make the school responsible for policing what students are doing on the school network, and thus, the school would be responsible if they aren't effective. In fact, it seems to be operating under the assumption that this is already happening. The University of Iowa, I'm told, functions this way, but any university which does anything to hinder piracy is not doing themselves any favors.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
'Their options include taking steps to limit how much bandwidth can be consumed by peer-to-peer networking
profs researchers and students: "you're limiting our academic freedom, sysadmins, you're fired!"
monitoring traffic
Yeah, like schools can afford to hire a team to monitor traffic and hunt down offenders
using a commercial product to reduce or block illegal file sharing
Yeah, like schools can afford to buy a product and hire a team to use the product and hunt down offenders
or "vigorously" responding to copyright infringement notices from copyright holders.
Yeah, like schools can afford to hire a team to hunt down offenders
Only one is do-able, and it prevents valid learning from happening.
Last spring, my school finally shut down/banned the student-run DC++ hub. Frankly, I'm amazed it took so long for this to happen. All the same, without a gigabit fiber-connected hub sharing ~70TiB of "stuff", there's not much fun left in going to a school in Cleveland.
hard where
Inga: Werewolf!
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: Werewolf?
Igor: There.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: What?
Igor: There, wolf. There, castle.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: Why are you talking that way?
Igor: I thought you wanted to.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: No, I don't want to.
Igor: [shrugs] Suit yourself. I'm easy.
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
Don't blame the government. Blame the RIAA's and MPAA's lobbyists in Washington, who have the politicians in their back pockets.
Gotta love it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Sneakernet will rise again.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
They can crack down all they want. Sneakernet. Terrabyte and larger portable hard drives. Everything has *already* been "file shared" that's out there. That horse is out of the barn, and they simply cannot put it back in. Fine, crack down on the university ISP, the students will just walk a hundred movies and ten thousand tunes around in their pockets, and still share them around. Hundreds of thousands of them will do that, on every campus that gets the federal MAFIAA treatment. What then, have security checkpoints with armed goons quick on the taser trigger with full frisking all over campus, 24/7, everywhere? Really? Because that is what it would take to stop any sort of mass sneakernet, and even then you couldn't really stop it, they'll just swap off campus instead.
College students may not be quite as much enthused about mass protest as they were back in the day, but something that draconian will get them aroused, and the universities would be shut down.
This is like alcohol prohibition or the war on unapproved and cheap drugs. A big fat expensive joke that will never work, ever.
Hey, big media sellers- didja ever think your "products" might be over priced just a scosh, that trying to charge many folding dollars for less than a penny copy cost just might be counter productive and a bad business decision, that your customers just hate being price gouged so they routed around your BS out to lunch unrealistic pricing, and have been doing so for years and years now?
Hey, corrupt, stupid and inept and bought off federal government..have ya noticed lately you are down to your own employees as the only demographic that even moderately approves of most of what you do, and half of them are seriously waffling, but are afraid to jump ship to no income at all because you thoroughly screwed up the private economy already?
....the only computers on site where I attended were either in the computer labs (in)conveniently located in the obscure corners of the campus, accessible during only the most idiotic of time periods, or the administration building where the only (legitimate) access involved login using an employee number assigned by the financial aid department. While computers were permitted in the dorms, relatively few students could actually acquire one as it was a bit outside their budget. As for internet access? Well, since you COULD get a phone line installed, dial up was pretty much the option you had, or "sneakernet" to the computer labs. Quite a few of those computer literate at the time had a friend or two who lived in town on their own and as often as not, would be willing to host software parties in exchange for either a small fee or favors that sometimes involved access to campus resources. If the campus cops caught you doing anything you shouldn't on campus, they either suspended, fined, expelled you, or handed you over to the city cops, who would then issue a citation, and/ or jail you depending on the infraction.
Nowadays, the options would likely be a bit more flexible. Larger number of students owning their own systems, likely portables, getting together at the local fast food outlet, family budget restaurant, having wi-fi access, sharing on the go, The previous options are still there of course, but would be seen as "last-resort" tactics, I imagine. Hell, considering the near ubiquity of wireless devices, I wouldn't be too surprised if some sort of mesh-network setup didn't spring up at some point, or do you really think the OLPC has a monopoly on the concept?
Leaving aside the question of whether illegal music downloading is something that requires legislation at the federal level, or whether the schools should be doing enforcement, there is another, central issue here that most people are ignoring like the elephant in the room:
If the federal government could legally require action by the schools, they would.
They cannot - so they are resorting to extortion. Public schools are legally required to do a large number of things which are expensive, and which the federal government provides funds to offset the cost of. Because the monies provided are not directly tied to the mandates and required to fund only them, the federal government can threaten to withhold its largess as a means of coercing schools into doing things it cannot legally require.
This is not unique to the educational system - the federal government has been doing it at the State level for some time now, as a means of doing an end run around the 10th Amendment: pass unfunded mandates that require action at the State level; provide federal funding not directly tied to the mandates; require that the states do things the federal government cannot legally force the states to do, on pain of losing the federal funding for failure to comply.
While it is not new at the individual level either, the advent of the recent health care legislation brought it home to all Americans - not just select groups.
Until we are ready to stand up and demand that the federal government abide by the Constitution as written (rather than as it would be convenient for the party in power at the time), we will lose a few more freedoms every year.
For those who say the Constitution is a living document, meant to change with the times, I heartily agree. The Founders provided a Constitutional Amendment process for exactly that reason. If you believe the Constitution does not accurately represent the needs of the present day, then by all means, amend it... but do not "reinterpret" it and try to tell me that is what it said all along, just because you know that an amendment to get what you want will never be ratified.
Everyone just stop paying their mortgages, auto loans, CC debt, student loans, tuition, electric bills etc etc. One month later the "special interest" will fail and the government will belong to the people once again.
New Economic Perspectives
Good for the RIAA. It should be made loud and clear to each student that any RIAA-backed song can put not only them in jeopardy but their parents and their schools if RIAA sees fit. Why would you want to download these songs, or buy them, or even listen to them? It's not worth worrying that your life will be ruined over a free download of whoever the 2010 Beyonce is. It's not worth paying anything to strengthen RIAA's inappropriate ability to do this. It's just not worth listening anymore to any RIAA song, even the cool old ones you heard on AM radio. Ten years after Napster, RIAA has made it actually more pleasurable to listen to Enzyte infomercials or cats yowling. RIAA has poisoned its playlist, finally. Hopefully, college students will see that there's nothing worth either downloading free or for a price.
pity as otherwise a bakesale for the us navy or any navy working of the east coast of africa might have counted. :-)
Why is it the university's job to police this stuff ... ?
It's not. It that there are many after the dot-bomb period and the ongoing Bush Depression that see the Universities as a captive market for failed business models that need greater than 100% subsidy to stay even in sight of being in the black.
In the digital era, the cost of making a new copy in not only negligible, but the copy itself is made with 100% fidelity and indistinguishable from the original. MPAA, RIAA and the companies they represent, like Microsoft and Disney, have a very out-dated business model based around an attempt to create an artificial scarcity for electronic media. Back when physical medium was important and reproduction and transport costs were high, the model worked. Now it is just stupid. Around 10 years ago, the sale of physical media took off due to the old (real) MP3 services. MPAA, RIAA not only did not see numbers but also went to great lengths to bury the facts and even go against the interests they claim to be defending.
The real bite from the current war against the Universities will hit a generation down the road. The pipe from basic research, to research, to applied research, to development, to product development, to product packaging, to training and maintenance, is long. The tap has been turned off and the pipe is filling with air while some flow is still visible. By the time the flow stops completely, there will be no mechanism or skills left to get going again. We're already seeing this in "IT" and Microsoft Resellers ponce around pretending to be teachers or developers, making sure that no one with skills is allowed through.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Corporatists believe the corporations should become the new government. They are actually collectivists. Ayn Rand their philosophical leader called her inner circle the "collective". How can you claim to be for individual liberty if you believe in corporate person hood?
I have read, at least, three biographies on Ayn Rand (in addition to many essays from the inner circle). The term "collective" was used tongue-in-cheek.
How can you claim to be for individual liberty if you believe in corporate person hood?
Eliminating corporations is OK. Eliminating incorporating (aka: organizing as a group with an explicit contract or charter) is OK. One thing we might do is to eliminate the limits on corporate liability. This would mean a stock can go to less than zero. It does not eliminate big companies or the stock market or the "impersonal" nature of a corporation. It would change a lot and is not necessarily incompatable with many - if not most - libertarian or O[o]bjectivist idealogies. It is also not incompatible with corporatism as you define it. Sure, it changes the rules, but it does not eliminate the game. Personal freedom - AKA "individual liberty", your words - means we can organize in quircky groups called a "collective" or form a company for a profitable or non-profitable venture. Your posts strongly implies you EITHER do not understand this OR disagree with this exercise of freedom. Which is it?
I never said you cannot organize in a group or that corporations should not exist. I said corporate personhood should not exist. Corporate personhood is like communism. It's a collective and it leads to corporate monarchy.
I agree with the right to assemble. I don't agree with collectivism. I believe that corporations should be treated as machines not as persons because they do not have human emotions. To call a corporation a person is like calling a tank a person.
Talk about a flawed analogy! A diamong ring might cost up around $10000, but here we're talking about songs whose theft is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Not to mention, most colleges have issues dealing with student problems already.
Example, a student was critical of a professor on campus, the professor got infuriated, and decided to claim that the student was threatening to kill her based on a message that could only be interpreted as a death threat if you were absolutely bat shit crazy and created an elaborate story behind the "meaning", thus "I hate this professor" becomes "SHE HATES ME AND WANTS TO KILL ME AND SAID SHE WILL"
The student in question is not allowed to be on campus, cannot appeal the process, and is currently suing the hell out of the school. My college also used to expell homosexuals. If you were outed or outed yourself, you were expelled, no fees paid back, and if you were caught on campus, you were to be arrested and the school would put a restraining order on you, and sue you for emotional distress and financial damages. That got repealed in 2002.
Same school that has escorts to protect the female students from creeps who like to hang around the womens restrooms at 10 pm with their dicks hanging out..who are now the escorts.
same school that will only allow rated G movies to be played because there might be children on campus.
Same school that hires staff who regularly abuse their authority just to cause problems for students who pay to be there? (security regularly harass students in the parking lot over small things, or give tickets anyway despite rules being followed, security who also will hold a bunch of unrelated people up while they "investigate" potential alcohol abuse based on a rumor.. I know several people who got dropped from their classes because of this)
Now the same school mentality that wants to push people away and get the current population to leave so the administration can still receive their pay checks even if only half the population is there, with most of the classes cut.
now we expect colleges to uphold copyright law? oh boy, I can see it now, a bunch of overzealous hired student staff and desk jockeys getting a stiffy every time they have an opportunity to fuck someone over.
...I owe you an apology. Your English was so good, for a non-native speaker/writer, that I assumed you were a native speaker. "Irregardless" is definitely not a word though. It is a bastardization of two vaguely related words: regardless (meaning, without regard) and irregard (meaning, without regard). Irregardless would then mean "without without regard" which is just non-sensical. This is one word that people should not accept with, "well the language changes". NO! IT JUST SOUNDS ASININE.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Why would it be any ISPs job to enforce the laws? That sounds like law enforcement's job. This makes no more sense than holding the people that put in your driveway responsible for ensuring you obey traffic laws.
...if the response is to "vigorously" tell the RIAA/MPAA to go tie itself in a knot?