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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
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.
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.
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
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
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!
...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.
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.