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.'"
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Or more likely, another excuse to raise tuition again.
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A better method (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Damn, I have mod points, I wish I could bump you up to +6 ;-)
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Why not require students to get their own i-net? (Score:2)
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.
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
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Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise is FREE from MSDNAA, and it is so easy to use that your department can hire undergraduate students to be SysAdmin, which means you can just pay them $9/hour and save all these personnel cost!
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90%? Your number is suspect, even for state-owned schools. And for private schools the % would be near zero.
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bleh, um, I misclicked and posted my reply to the wrong post. Curse my touchscreen phone.
Just avoid holding it that way!
Re:A better method (Score:4, Informative)
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Even better: hand them a bill. If a pirated song "costs" $300,000, bill them 1% for preventing this "theft".
Re:collective bargaining (Score:5, Insightful)
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Won't be necessary. The RIAA's sneak clause is stupid on so many levels. It'll fail, just like everything else the industry has tried to stop piracy.
Colleges can't stop piracy. And, it's none of their business. Making it their business doesn't solve anything. Some will undoubtedly waste some effort in appeasement by taking ineffective measures, just for show. Even if they wanted to take this issue seriously, there are no effective measures they can take. At most they may succeed in driving piracy f
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.
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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.
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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.
Do ivy league schools get federal funding? (Score:2)
Because if they don't, this is an elitist policy.
Idea-expression divide; out-of-print works (Score:2)
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 mo
But even doing that can cost alot just for the har (Score:2)
But even doing that can cost alot just for the hard where.
Re:But even doing that can cost alot just for the (Score:4, Funny)
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?
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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.'
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Its' alittle like "a lot"
now that's funny right they're.
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Seeing all the beautiful women at the Lilith Fair is WHERE I get HARD.
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"won't they ever learn?" (Score:2)
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.
Outsource it! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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at which point they'll say "we're ot suing you under the DMCA idiots. Safe harbour is not an issue here. just do as you're told or we pull funding"
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sed
/bin/grep'ing a bit too much for the right spelling there have we?
opportunity? (Score:2)
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seems to me like a lucrative opportunity for delivering some checkmark software solutions at discount price.
I've got a state of the art anti-piracy solution. It's $500 per implementation + $0.10 per student. It's a sheet of printed paper with a Yes check box and a no Check box, with the following sentence written above them:
"Will you download things you don't have the copyright to using our network?"
If the student checks Yes, my friend Boris here will punch them in the stomach, and hand them a new form. If they check No, we mind our own fucking business.
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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.
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There are no performance targets to meet as to whether or not the plan will actually DO anything. Just another lip service campaign.
There are no performance targets yet. These RIAA/MPAA knows enough to force change in small steps.
Eventually they will require/force all institutions to use some kind of music subscription service that
'rents' you the media as long as you keep paying. Then they'll be required to get a certain percentage
subscribed to this which will force them to include it as part of the tuition
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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).
Colleges are easy targets (Score:2, Interesting)
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 bui
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.
Insulting (Score:2, Flamebait)
Why do the RIAA and MPAA get federal assistance? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the RIAA is the federal government. (Score:2)
If you haven't figured that out by now maybe you should look at who funded Obama's rise to power.
What do they want to acchieve? (Score:2)
Indentured servitude via blackmail. Interesting! (Score:2)
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?
thanks RIMPAA (Score:2, Troll)
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 en
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Loopholes (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes We Can! (Score:3, Funny)
Obama: Where "Yes we can" means "No you cannot!"
Luckily... (Score:5, Funny)
...we have a good guy on our side in the White House. Obama will surely strike this down, pronto.
I used to work at a college ... (Score:5, Funny)
... 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.
Colleges risk students fighting Piracy! (Score:2)
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...
Get RIAA to pay. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 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/uplo
great idea! (Score:2, Flamebait)
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...
Fighting piracy (Score:2, Funny)
> Colleges Risk Losing Federal Funding If They Don't Fight Piracy
Yeah. They'd better send some ships to the Somalian coast.
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".
Just like the war on drugs. (Score:2)
If you get convicted of a felony via drugs for example, you can not get financial aid.
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.
Full text of the provision. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Do it from home? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I can actually study while my computer downloads stuff (irregardless of its legality).
Does yours require you to manually copy the bits or something? :)
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I can actually study while my computer downloads stuff (irregardless of its legality).
Does yours require you to manually copy the bits or something? :)
How do you keep the punch cards from getting out of order while you're distracted studying?
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Punch cards? Bah. I upgraded to a Commodore 1541 disk drive - holds about 2500 punchcards on a single disk! :-o
I'd like to get a 1581 with 880k of space but it's too costly for my budget. Think of all the SID tunes I could store on that thing! Probably hundreds of cool songs like Take On Me, Pleasure Principle, Beat It, and so on.
Re:Do it from home? (Score:5, Funny)
You insensitive clod.
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epic!
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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
Did you watch it in 3D?
Dorms (Score:2)
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.
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100 mbit?
I went to school a while ago and even then 100mbit was a joke for on campus connections.
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Should have picked a better school. Each dorm had it's own T3 for us.
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".
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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.
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Yeah, because phone neutrality (read: Common Carrier), is clearly being abused in similar manners right now.
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These are hardly consequences of common carrier laws.
hilarious (Score:4, Funny)
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?
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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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Just because some regulation is good doesn't mean more is better. Just because some regulation is bad doesn't mean less is better. It's an implementation problem, not a process problem.
He's a corporatist not a libertarian. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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>>>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?
>>>
FLAW #1: Libertarians are not anarchists. They don't want to "destroy" government. They realize government is a necessary evil.
FLAW #2: In the process of shrinking government, Libertarians would also revoke the government-issued corporate licenses (unconstitutional), so the corporations would no longer exist to
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I can't wait for the day when the government is allowed to regulate internet traffic through "net neutrality" legislation.
Please educate yourself on what "net neutrality" actually means. Jesus. It's not that hard.
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Would you rather corporations do it instead? (Score:2)
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.
Re:First? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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
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What else? Large bribe.. err "campaign donations".
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it's also old news.
why are we covering such an old fucking article?
Re:First? (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
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If the federal government would lower the federal income tax and decrease federal subsidies, while working with states so they can increase state income taxes for a net gain or loss, there would be more money around for these projects BECAUSE NO FEDERAL BUREAUCRAT WOULD BE NEEDED TO TELL MY STATE WHAT TO DO WITH MY MONEY!!!! No
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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 departmen
Does that include sneakernet? (Score:2, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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
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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.
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Really though, the damage is done when schools have to spend increasing amounts of their budgets stopping their students from sharing, rather than spending that money on worthwhile, educ
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If you dont like how the RIAA controls your government perhaps YOU should donate $100mil to their campaign fund too!