Colleges Risk Losing Federal Funding If They Don't Fight Piracy 285
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.'"
It's really not that bad... (Score:4, Informative)
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).
Re:First? (Score:3, Informative)
What else? Large bribe.. err "campaign donations".
Re:A better method (Score:3, Informative)
90%? Your number is suspect, even for state-owned schools. And for private schools the % would be near zero.
Re:A better method (Score:4, Informative)
Re:First? (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:A better method (Score:5, Informative)
$100/semester? That's cheap. I work at a University and I'm involved with some of the decisions that go on at the border:
Implementation of firewall (hasn't been one until this year), bandwidth shaper and intrusion detection:
Syslog server + syslog license upgrade (not kidding): $50,000/year, $2000/year support contract
2 Cisco 6500 chassis with 10Gig modules: $60,000, $5000/year support contract
Redundant IBM IDS: $100,000, $10,000/year support contract
Redundant Traffic shaper upgrade: $20,000
5 consultants for 3 years: ~$2,000,000
Taking away time with meetings from 15 other employees because the contractors don't know what they're doing: ~$500,000 in lost time
Having the existing network team do the planning, communication, testing and implementation from scratch in 2 months: infuriating
Noticing that some of the vendors haven't actually tested their equipment in real life with 10GigE and multiple mult-gigabit Internet, Internet2 and MAN connections and thus coming short in processing capacity: even more infuriating
Noticing that everything you just bought are just Linux/Unix-flavor boxes with Xeon processors and mostly open source software: priceless
Re:Insulting (Score:2, Informative)
Well, for starter is might be because the schools (K-12) are actively teaching the benefits of piracy. You know, the teacher tells the students that this new piece of software for everyone to use actually costs $500 but she got it for free from www.thepiratebay.com and there is lots of other stuff out there - they should check it out. Next day one of the students is telling the others what great stuff he found out there and spreads it around.
Think it doesn't happen? Wrong.
Your credit card fraud item is a joke, right? You haven't been paying attention. There are criminal gangs operating all over the world that do this sort of thing, generally from relatively law-free places or places where the cops respond very well to bribes. How you going to stop it?
For both piracy and credit card fraud, it doesn't cost anyone anything and nobody can do anything about it. Live with it. If you are upset about credit card fraud, consider it just another aspect of a generally law-free Internet. It is going to happen. It happens to me once a year on average and it has yet to cost me anything.
Re:A better method (Score:1, Informative)