Anti-P2P College Bill Moving Through House 334
An anonymous reader writes "A news.com article is covering an amendment to the College Opportunity and Affordability Act (pdf) that should make folks in Hollywood, the RIAA, and the MPAA well pleased. The tiny section seeks to hinge government approval of an institution of higher learning on whether or not they adequately dissuade Peer-to-Peer filesharing of copyrighted materials. The Act came out of the House Education and Labor Committee, which agreed on the terms unanimously. There is still some question, though, as to what penalties should be handed down for institutions that don't do enough to protect intellectual property. 'Some university representatives and fair-use advocates worry that schools run the risk of losing aid for their students if they fail to come up with the required plans. "The language in the bill appears to be clear that failure to carry out the mandates would make an institution ineligible for participation in at least some part of Title IV (which deals with federal financial aid programs)," Steven Worona, director of policy and networking programs for the group Educause, said in a telephone interview Thursday.'" Update: 11/16 16:36 GMT by Z : PDF link corrected.
I have a great idea... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's time for a governmental wide recall. (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, Americans (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, if your elected politicians will vote for this, what else are they doing that defies all sense?
Call them up. (Score:2, Insightful)
Where's the Constitutionality? (Score:5, Insightful)
My father came to this country penniless, and worked as a waiter to get through college. He didn't have Federal support for college, so upon graduating he had no debt. Today, most of my friends who graduated in 1996-1998 still are paying off their bills, and I'm sure I'm partially paying for some of it through whatever fraudulent taxation system the Feds use to acquire my funds to pay for others.
Can't people see that Federally-financed loans are one of the primary reasons that tuition is so high? Before Federal loans, colleges would loan students their own money (at 1-2% interest) to go to school. The colleges had good reason to keep tuition low since they were taking a risk with their own money. Now we have people paying for college loans until they're 35 -- and those who never went to college and never wanted to are supporting others as well.
Combine that with no Constitutional mandate for regulation of the Internet, or for criminalizing non-physical content sharing, and you have a really hilarious law that would make the Founders roll in their graves non-stop.
This bill is a non-issue. It protects the inherent rights of no individual, but provides subsidies to special interest groups. Where's the Supreme Court when you need them?
So no more common carrier status? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this make them liable for anything else illegal done with their network? What about the transmission of viruses?
I don't think they want to go this route.
Re:I have another bill that should be passed (Score:3, Insightful)
damn I lost my mod points yesterday
Re:Work Arounds (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Outdated business model cramping your style? (Score:5, Insightful)
I open a store and say "Come on in and pay whatever you want." Are you on f---ing crack? Do you really believe that's a business model that works?
Movies came to the home market at $65 to $160 each. Piracy was a problem even though a blank T120 VHS tape sold for $15 - $20 each. I know, been there and done that. CD's on the other hand have added rootkits and DRM to make them incompatible with your playback equipment (iPod) by trying to prevent ripping. At the time I can buy full length movies at 2 for $20 or 4 for $20 in the pre viewed section at Blockbuster, many CDs are still less than an hour in length and are over $10 each. They are often not marked that they contain defective by design problems. Movies have THX certification for quality assurance of both the video and audio quality. CDs on the other hand are engineered to compete in the loudness war at the expense of dynamic range and harmonic distortion (Clipping).
Go a head and open a store. Provide in inferior product that won't play on my portable MP3 player for an extreme price and tell me again how this business model works? I buy movies instead.
I can buy oldies (movies) at Wal*Mart for 5.99. Try to find any good 20 year old Kiss, Pink Floyd, Styx, Queen, etc for 5.99 that hasn't been compressed.
Re:Hey, Americans (Score:2, Insightful)
How can anyone in your country sit by and watch this sort of thing?
This isn't simply an American problem. This sort of private co-opting of government is a big problem, but it's not just *our* problem as Americans. You appear to be Canadian - your government saw fit some time ago to provide a subsidy to your recording associations for all blank media sold in your country. That's just one example. So please - we don't need the condescending bit, it's a problem pretty much everywhere.
Re:MPAA & RIAA for Congress (Score:3, Insightful)
A quick google search found these.
List of representatives [house.gov]
Search for yours, by zip. Make it easier! [visi.com]
Send a letter.
Re:Where's the Constitutionality? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now we have loans, which I consider to be a huge step backwards.
The idea of funding (in the Federal level in the US) is to ensure that if someone proves themself to be extraordinarily bright, the fact that they may not have enough money to attend university should not be a barrier to them receiving a damn good education. The principle behind this is that this bright person may well come up with the solution to a problem that cures cancer, solves the energy problems of the world or some other wonderful thing.
They may also create the next plague, be an evil mastermind or some other thing. But the point is that while they're pursuing their dream, they're quite probably going to be in a highly paid job doing some extremely high brow work. And while they're working, they're getting taxed. And over time this elevated level of tax paid more than pays back the money they were allocated by having their tuition fees paid for.. And all the while potentially helping improve the quality of life for all.
So, I've no problems with grants, or anything else like that which funds education. That's a good use of money that stands an elevated chance of making the world a better place.
Now, to turn round and say "If you don't kow tow to the special interests of a business entity, we'll remove your accreditation to effectively teach people and educate them", what you're essentially saying is that you don't care about the future potential money that may be generated by all the people being taught in the future, especially the very bright, but poorer ones who NEED the funding.
You'd rather hamstring your technological base of the future, and future competitiveness in the world market to satiate the demands of a corporate entity that produces NO technology, merely entertainment (which is fast becoming of questionably value world wide).
This is a very good strategy, long term, to ensure you become a second class country with an inferior technology base. Money in the pockets of a few non-entities at the sacrifice of the progress of all.
Rank blackmail and extortion.
Democrats need to be CAREFUL (Score:3, Insightful)
The Democrats have historically been directed by "big media" and when their targets were hazy, people were less offended. But now the targets are clearly defined and those targets VOTE... especially when they are being targeted and have someone to vote out of office.
Analogy time! (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's choose a lobby, any lobby...let me think....no, scratch that, let's go for the gold, let's choose AIPAC (pro-Israel lobby).
Ok, now, let's have this lobby sponsor an amendment to one of these education bills, calling for the schools to take action and develop plans to ensure there is no anti-Israel "hate speech" anywhere on campus. Further, the schools who don't take sufficient action risk losing funding. Schools develop fucking SWAT teams to check every book in the library, every dorm room, scan every poster or flyer, oversee the school newspapers, etc.
Or let's also throw in the soup lobby, the carrot lobby, the evangelists, big tobacco, big pharma, television, hell, every lobby you can think of, adding their respective amendments about bloody everything.
Where this is even possible, schools of higher learning, the bastions of freedom of thought and expression, the foundations of critical thought, where the right to hold alternative beliefs and opinions is sacred, are no more. When it comes to education there should be nothing remotely resembling lobby group amendments.
700 pages? F that (Score:5, Insightful)
Passing a bill without reading and understanding it should be treated as treason, plain and simple. Don't like it? Don't run for Congress or don't vote on the bill. Period.
Re:Everything is copyrighted (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Outdated business model cramping your style? (Score:2, Insightful)
While DVDs are sold for $5 in Wal-Mart, it's usually because most people just don't want those titles. By contrast, I would imagine that most music made in the last 20 years still has a good amount of demand, which is why their prices haven't gotten lower.
Yet another illustration ... (Score:2, Insightful)
When the Federal government becomes the source of significant funding for education, it also automatically becomes a magnet for those who wish to impose their will on the educational system -- whether related to the educational process or not.
It works everywhere. For example, states have to bow to the Federal government in the design of their roads and driver's licenses and what-have-you because otherwise they risk losing the rebate of tax money that was originally partially collected from their state -- in the form of Federal highway funds.
The collapse of the USSR demonstrated the inherent inability of highly centralized, heavy-handed bureaucracies to cope with the extremely varied and variable conditions of the real world. It's somewhat baffling to see that the US public has apparently not gotten that lesson at all and continues to support the trend toward emulating the Soviet mistakes.
Then again, oh wait, I get it. It's not baffling at all. The US public was mostly "educated" in the system of government-run schools, which feeds children a steady diet of propaganda so that by the time they grow up they're convinced that Big Brother Knows Best and they should Sit Down and Shut Up.
Sad to see how the "land of the free and the home of the brave" has become the "land of the cowardly slaves."
sneaker net (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to wonder if, given how inexpensive external drives are and how close college students live to one another, forcing people into a mode where the standard is to share thousands (or tens of thousands) of songs in a single transaction is an effective way to reduce piracy. Sure, the number of people who do this might shrink, but the number of songs pirated might go up.
Re:I have another bill that should be passed (Score:5, Insightful)
You could have some cool indie band that was massively popular amongst the slashdot reading demographic, but they will never get a record deal or national tour sponsored, because they do not generate money.
Removing yourself from the marketplace for music means losing any influence whatsoever on the supply side decisions. Money talks.
Re:I have another bill that should be passed (Score:3, Insightful)
There are a large number of people that don't like them and don't pirate (count me in that crowd)
The reason the are popular is that they pander to the lowest frequent denominator. I won't use "common", as in that phrase, it means found everywhere. Sadly that is pretty low.
Re:Outdated business model cramping your style? (Score:3, Insightful)
No (Score:5, Insightful)
The best way to promote change and make sure your Congressman listens to you over some corporation is to make sure he knows that his job depends on him doing so, and the best way to do that is to demonstrate it by repeatedly swapping congressmen out of office after one term.
Of course, one person alone can't do that much so you might need to band together with likeminded people. Perhaps you should form a PaC. That worked pretty well for the AARP (They all vote, too. That's an important bit.)
Oh, except then you'd be a big corporate interest and your congressman still won't listen to you! Oh... the irony...
Re:Hey, Americans (Score:2, Insightful)
Also knowing that, in theory at least, that money does get distributed to the artists.
Does it or not? The difference between theory and reality is that in reality, theory doesn't mean shit.
Having said that, it's a meager token, one that I happily pay as it allows our government to tell the **AA to take a flying leap on our behalf.
Since when does giving someone money tell them to take a flying leap?
I really don't have a problem with an artist getting paid a pittance when a copy of their work is made.
I'd have a probelm with any tax designed to reimburse a private entity for illegal actions I'm not committing.
Point being, this is not even remotely the same thing. Please refrain from throwing our government under the bus with that of the US ;)
My point is, don't throw rocks from your glass house. The condescending crap from foreigners who evidently are bored enough to criticize the US gets old. Deal with your own problems, we don't need your 'advice.'
Re:It is the universities that will suffer from th (Score:2, Insightful)
Have YOU done YOUR part? (Score:3, Insightful)
I just contacted my rep. It took all of five minutes to write this up. Have YOU contacted yours? Speak up, or this thing WILL be passed as-is.
(My rep's name is Jeff Flake.. I wasn't insulting the guy.)
Re:Outdated business model cramping your style? (Score:3, Insightful)
Fundamentally Flawed (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as a corporation can buy the laws it wants others to follow the country is heading for ruin (or already there).
The difference here is that as much as we bitch about it nothing really gets done to change it... it's very much drowned in apathy. Especially when the stigma to the layman is that if you oppose this then you ARE a distributor of illegal "insert whatever here". We seriously need to see forward thinking education to the masses on why this is such a bad idea. Same as the DMCA and other "let's get it through fast" legislation. They introduce these bills & laws without fully understanding what they are doing or the REAL affect it will have on society. We need to reach the layman and let them know WTF is going on. It's great to share bitch-fests with other techies on /. but my mother, cousin Jenny working at the supermarket, and Bob the mailman down the road need to know why we bitch with so much zeal.
When is the time to rise up and to do something for real change? We are the people that have a deep inside knowledge of this matter, maybe it's time to "hack the planet" and get the message out to more than just our own SIGs.
Re:Outdated business model cramping your style? (Score:5, Insightful)
Say it's 1403, and you form an association that collaborates, organizes and controls all written documents. You call it the "Stationers Company/Guild".
Then decades later, in 1436 or so, someone invents a printing press, and it makes it easier printing documents with much less effort.
At first, you market the quality of hand printed works. Later you buy some of these machines, print documents cheaper, but try to keep control.
But at the end of the early to mid 1500's there are too many other groups that have the printing machines, and the control of your company is dwindling.
So the obvious thing to do? Use the money that you have, to buy some government. So in 1557, the government gives you a royal charter, a monopoly for all printing. You milk that for as long as you can (for 130 years it that case).
Now fast forward to the 20th century.
Your MPAA or RIAA has pretty tight control of the production and distribution of movies and music. Printing high quality records and film is an expensive business to get into, so it is natural for large company control.
Then this thing called the Internet is invented. A media production and distribution middle man no longer is necessary. Things like mp3.com and napster pop up, and information is flowing, uncontrolled.
Well, it this case, we repeat the methods of the Stationers. Buy some government. In addition to lawsuits based on already purchased copyright monopolies, we buy a copyright extension, buy a new DMCA law to protect our new DRM encryption scheme, and buy laws to increase penalties for those damn college students who refuse to allow us to have the control we had before the internet.
Re:Outdated business model cramping your style? (Score:3, Insightful)
the internet lets you break the RIAA monopoly easily. here you go:
1)record music
2)put music for sale on website
3)profit!
but the file sharing crowd would rather do this:
1)copy someone else's music!
Thats where it goes wrong. ironically, the same people who bitch about torrent ratios and 'leeches' and people 'not saying thanks' on forums sharing copyrighted files, do not realise they are the ultimate leeches, the people who take commercially produced content for free and give NOTHING back.
There is no longer a monopoly on content. anyone can make it. I myself make PC games and bypass the retail market altogether. I'm dong what the web has enabled the little guy to do, to compete against the big guys. But most people can't be bothered to actually make content. they bitch about the content other people make, but their protest is basically to steal other peoples stuff, not to make anything different.
There is nothing obsolete about the business model of making stuff and selling it. Wal Mart does this every day. Why a special set of rules for stuff online? admit it, its because you like to leech free stuff and are seeking for some dubious justification for it.
If you really think that content should all be free, then that's communism. but that means you need to work your eight hours a day for free too. Happy with that?
Re:I have another bill that should be passed (Score:3, Insightful)
When your "purely personal" activity infringes on the Constitutional right others to be secure in their person and property.
I don't care what you smoke, drink, inject, sniff or screw, as long as your activity only harms you and no one else.
If it were only possible to bring back from the dead a person MURDERED by a driver using a vehicle under the influence of alcohol, or one smoking pot, or sniffing glue, or using meth, or whatever. But no, we have to bury the innocent and support the drunk in jail for a few months or years, if he gets convicted. Then he's out free and others have their lives and property at risk again.
College kids aren't the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
So where are we now? Well, everyone, college and non-college folk alike, have the same unfettered access to p2p technology. What they decide to do with that technology is not determined by whether they are on a college campus or not. In fact, once that initial hype over being able to download anything in seconds subsided, I became much more selective about what I downloaded. This was the case with many people I knew. After a while, you start to ask yourself, "Do I really NEED to download this?" where before it didn't matter if you needed to, you just did anyway, because you could. At the same time, the **AA was rattling their sabers over lawsuits and iTunes hit a level of maturity. People began go legit in droves. So is college any different than anyone else?
So some may argue that college campuses do a lot of incestuous p2p sharing. Where someone sets up a Direct Connect server and the massive student population just shares among themselves. Well yes this happens, but it's not as widespread as you may think. First and foremost, this activity violates many schools network use policies. P2p servers are also easy to spot because you notice 90% of the schools bandwidth is being taken up by a single ip address on the third floor of a dormitory. This means that a p2p server will not last long, as the IT department will either block the traffic or just outright revoke that individuals internet privileges. Even early on when p2p hit big, a lot of schools banned p2p apps from their networks. This was usually a futile effort because once a new app came out, everyone jumped on the new one and the game of cat and mouse began.
O
Re:Outdated business model cramping your style? (Score:1, Insightful)
Upstarts in the music industry, however, cannot get away with this. No amount of google page rankings is going to get people to "try" your music. The established giants have a lock on the advertising vectors and there is no way around them. They use their lock on the advertising vectors to keep people from even trying to make music and put it on a website for sale. Therefore, I don't feel bad about taking from them what they have prevented me from getting legitimately.
Re:Outdated business model cramping your style? (Score:4, Insightful)
except increasingly people do not support the constitutional model, they just take everything for free and stick two fingers up at anyone dumb enough to make any new content. take a look at the asshole who also replied to my post to stick the knife in to see what I mean. Despite having a free demo, he insisted on stealing my stuff just so he could slag me off on teh interweb.
filesharers treat the content producers like scum. We are all branded as MPAA-MAFIAAAAAA regardless of what we do or who we are. I don't use DRM, I have free demos, no adverts, no adware, spyware or rootkits, and my stuff is pirated just as much as the next guy. In other words I have ZERO incentive to act ANY differently to 'teh evil mafiaaaaaa'. The actions of people pirating stuff just drives every content provider to act like the worst of them. This is obvious.
"I assume that you pay royalties on Happy Birthday."
*sigh*. where have I said that I support that crap? I support artists being paid for their work and not having their content pirated. I also support format shifting, backups and fair use, and limited copyright terms. Yet you acted like a typical pro-piracy kid in slagging me off like an evil MPAA stooge just because I dared suggest that pirating stuff is wrong.
In short, its the attitude of hardcore pro-piracy people like you that mean the MPAA nd RIAA will never change their minds, and in fact have zero incentive to do so.
Re:Outdated business model cramping your style? (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop trying to turn this into a 'poor fileshareers vs evil big business' debate. You advocate the little guy making his own content and making a living from it right? So why the fuck is it still ok to steal the content made by the little guy? How many torrent sites check each submission and go "heck this is a small, customer-friendly and innovative small business, methinks we should not torrent their content".
If you REALLY wanted to get back at the RIAA you would BUY music direct from non-RIAA artists. the same goes for games, movies etc etc. But I'm guessing like 99% of anti-RIAA campaigners, your 'solution' is to just still consume the same content made by the big businesses you hate, but to steal it.
You are changing *nothing* by doing that. You will NEVER change a market to which you have made yourself invisible.
WRONG (Score:2, Insightful)
The original purpose of copyright was to motivate people to produce creative works. It was not intended for these creative works to be restricted from public use until 70 years after the death of the author of the work. We also notice all over the internet that people are creating all sorts of creative works with no compensation. Look to sites such as jamendo [jamendo.com], YTMND [ytmnd.com], or Something Awful [somethingawful.com]. Look at all of the hundreds of thousands of blogs. Look at the Free Software movement. All of these communities are built upon sharing information and media with the community. There is no form of compensation to the users of these communities, yet they still produce works. There is no need for copyright.
Re:Outdated business model cramping your style? (Score:1, Insightful)
Because none of these things apply to any of the stupid bargain-basement things I've seen. A $5 DVD loss-leader would be a retailer taking, say, The Simpsons Movie and selling it for $5 each, in the hopes that the sales of other stuff generated by people coming in to take advantage of this great bargain would make up for their losses. But whenever I've seen cheapo DVDs, they are cheap because they are worthless things that most people would not want to buy. And given that production costs on DVDs are well under a dollar, and royalties on such ancient fare are not that great, there is no reason to think that they don't make money on $5 bargain-bin DVDs.
A loss leader:
- Is frequently placed in a location which forces purchasers to pass a lot of other (profitable) merchandise.
- Is something that is purchased frequently so that buyers will understand how much of a great deal it is.
- Is frequently limited to a certain number per customer to discourage stockpiling.
- Has limited stock available