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.'"
First? (Score:1, Insightful)
This is bullshit
collective bargaining (Score:5, Insightful)
All get together and agree to do nothing. Watch as the government doesn't withdraw federal funding for all schools.
Re:collective bargaining (Score:3, Insightful)
Or more likely, another excuse to raise tuition again.
Do it from home? (Score:1, Insightful)
You're going to school to study, presumably.
Re:Do it from home? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:collective bargaining (Score:3, Insightful)
Even better: hand them a bill. If a pirated song "costs" $300,000, bill them 1% for preventing this "theft".
Actually (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Aren't you guys excited for net neutrality? (Score:4, Insightful)
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".
Re:Aren't you guys excited for net neutrality? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Spin off dorm internet? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Shameful Business as Usual (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:collective bargaining (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do the RIAA and MPAA get federal assistance? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:hilarious (Score:3, Insightful)
Rant Much?
Regulation is also often used by large corporations to keep small businesses out of the marketplace and in this case large business is using regulations to force universities to become the net police.
Large corporations love regulations, it keeps other players out of the game.
that is 100% true! (Score:2, Insightful)
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!!!???
Re:collective bargaining (Score:5, Insightful)
All get together and agree to do nothing. Watch as the government doesn't withdraw federal funding for all schools.
Watch as the schools turn off the P2P tap.
You think the bloke who pays for the keg believes in free beer?
The government doesn't have to cut funding to all schools. It only has to make examples of a few to demonstrate that it means business.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Three Words: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:collective bargaining (Score:3, Insightful)
There is an easier alternative and one I would take if I were president of a college. Simply not provide students internet access. Let them get it on their own. If a student wants access to the internet in their dorm room, allow the local provider to wire it in. That will take care of this legislation because the network is no longer the college network.
Re:A better method (Score:3, Insightful)
Limit bandwidth used by P2P networks (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Higher Education Opportunity Act - 2008 (Score:3, Insightful)
"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".
Re:collective bargaining (Score:3, Insightful)
Whether you watch 500GB of iTunes movies or 500GB of torrents, it's going to cost the uni about the same (yes, yes, small overhead). If they want to throttle Internet leisure activity by limiting consumption in a period of time, that's quite understandable. The problem appears when the school starts expressing a preference for your Internet leisure activity.
Re:collective bargaining (Score:3, Insightful)
What a fucking joke these people are. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:collective bargaining (Score:2, Insightful)
There is zero collective will in the US to stand up against big government or big business if it requires any inconvenience or any effort beyond bitching around the water cooler. Once again the American government is using the peoples OWN money to control them.
American citizens are the largest herd of bleating sheep in the world.
*sigh* (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Aren't you guys excited for net neutrality? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:First? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:What a fucking joke these people are. (Score:2, Insightful)
And yet, here you are, posting on Slashdot.
I also noticed you didn't single out the pirates for spending their time downloading Britney Spears while an entire ecology is dying, which is interesting. At least the RIAA keeping afloat has positive effects on the economy. What have the pirates contributed in their time not spent stopping oil spills?