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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.'"
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.
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
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.
If you live in a dorm hundreds of miles from your parents, school is home.
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'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!
Proper net neutrality regulation should essentially be:
"An ISP may not prioritize or de-prioritize network traffic based upon either its source or its destination".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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.
why would they need net neutrality legislation?
If done right any such legislation would have no such requirement but if they're intent on taking control they'll just stick it into some legislation on phone lines or at the back of something aimed at the postoffice but phrased broadly enough to give them control over the net and other forms of communcation as well.
there's nothing wrong with actual net neutrality.
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.
Pretty much. The network belongs to the College and just like any other ISP, if they want to allow downloading they should be able to. The US Government should not be seeking to damage the educational institution, but then the Federal government is filled with tyrannical Oligarchs so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Sovyet Union meet European Union meet United States. Same difference.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
My school doesn't have computers, so I have someone at another university send the pirated movies to me bit by bit via morse code. I then transcribe this onto paper. I then get the art department to decode the bits by hand and draw each frame by hand onto gigantic sheets of paper. We then assemble all of these sheets into a gigantic flip book which we hang on the wall of the student union. We then have the A/V club flip the sheets rapidly while the rest of us watch the "movie". It's a difficult process, and we had a rash of suicides after expending all that effort just to see how crappy The Last Airbender was, but it works pretty well most of the time.
You insensitive clod.
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.
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
What else? Large bribe.. err "campaign donations".
My rights don't need management.
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
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!
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.
Obama: Where "Yes we can" means "No you cannot!"
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.
The students may be motivated. But their tuition is subsidized - their school is subsidized - and the Bank of Mom and Dad is overdrawn - and its back to flipping burgers at McDonalds.
...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.
Pretty much. The network belongs to the College and just like any other ISP, if they want to allow downloading they should be able to
More than that, they should be considered to be a carrier and to be immune so long as they DON'T do any filtering, and responsible for all traffic originating from their network if they do any filtering. And in fact nothing in this piece of shit^Wlegislation contradicts that :p
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What...federal student aid? Yeah.
It has a net effect of raising tuition across the board (since the government just raises the available loan money every time the colleges decide they would like to charge more). And it also results in lots of people being burdened with lifelong debt for skills that the market doesn't want (a situation in which they would not be if the loan money wasn't available).
Education used to be a means of upward social mobility. Nowadays it is just a means of keeping greater portions of the population in greater debt (with a few exceptions, of course).
... 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.
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
"A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have" Gerald Ford. Aug 12, 1974
Remember this next time people say "But the government should provide this, this and that...". Now I've personally never met the Devil, but I would imagine him as something a lot like a government.
Life is not for the lazy.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
Don't blame the government. Blame the RIAA's and MPAA's lobbyists in Washington, who have the politicians in their back pockets.
Please educate yourself on what kind of law would be passed under the guise of "net neutrality". It's not that hard.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I tend to agree. Why is it the university's job to police this stuff when they are, for all intents and purposes, a general purpose ISP? Unless they are actually aiding and abetting piracy by running some kind of university sharing service, I really don't think policing all this is their job. I think this is just an example of the industry going after the entity with the deepest pockets rather than the person who is actually breaking the law. It's like going after the state highway department because a drug smuggler drove on the rode.
The only time I think a university should be involved is taking down, say, a pirate bay type website that student sets up using free university web server space that they often provide. But even then, that should be done at the request of the copyright holder. They shouldn't constantly have to peruse thousands of student websites to make sure they aren't doing anything wrong. In short, go after the lawbreaker, not the network provider. If they can sue anyone just because their product is used improperly, then we'll have no networks and no roads.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
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.
Well I don't know about him, but I liked the state government here in AR when Bill Clinton ran things as Gov. Unlike the other Govs that act like rock stars with limo and guards, you could actually run into Bill at the mall or getting some veggies (he was always trying to diet) at the river market.
I actually ran into him during the Xmas season one year and said hi, he said "how am I doing?"? and I said "great Gov, except for the roads up north". He said "I don't get up north as much as I'd like, so if you got a few minutes I'd like to know which ones need the most work". You have to remember at the time I had hair halfway down my ass and full biker leather, and here was the governor wanting to chat me up just the same as if I was one of his guys. Sure enough right after the holiday he took a trip up north, just like he said he would, and announced a road construction project to fix the roads that needed it.
So yeah, I'd say you can get better treatment at the state level, if you get the right guy. And I know it would be a step down from being pres, but if old Bill came back tomorrow we'd be happy to put him right back in as gov.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.