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 another bill that should be passed (Score:5, Interesting)
No offence, but why should one illegal activity like that be treated above all others? Here's one, one that's more useful, ban the funding to colleges that don't do enough to prevent rape on campus. That would actually be a good crime-prevention to tie to funding, and it is a problem.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like stealing (or the less wieldly intellectual property infringement if you prefer), and it's bad. But this industry that has long since lost 95% of it's creativity and intelligence, is now trying to force money from people, threatening the creativity and intelligence of those people also? Make people dumber so they like your stuff more? Make Brittany Spears and Backdoor Boys more popular?
That is the stupidest waste of legal paper I've seen in a long time.
Everything is copyrighted (Score:5, Interesting)
It is the universities that will suffer from this (Score:5, Interesting)
There are now a lot of ways to get a degree, and since the employee market is flooded with them now, they don't have nearly as much meaning as they once did. And the traditional schools pumping out so many psychology and sociology majors (my self included) without any job market to support them has added to this problem. Degrees are like driver's licenses these days. Your boss wants a copy for their file, but never really looks at it again.
Locally we've seen huge growth in 'technical colleges' and 'education centers'. My wife goes to Kaplan online. A good friend of mine used the University of Pheonix. Have they suffered for those choices? Not really, because the name on the degree isn't that important any more. Just like with comic books, when you print too many of the damn things the value goes way, way down.
With that in mind, imagine the bevy of options a young person would have these days in terms of education. Imagine also that they get to their dorm room and realize that they can't use the internet. Well, technically they can, but they lose access to a lot of content that is important to them. Their lives for the next five years (and yes, the profit model really does encourage at least four and a half...) will be less enjoyable for a number of reasons. Should access to the internet be one of them?
And in this mindset, how many will begin to wonder if their credits will transfer?
Re:Have another cigar fellas... (Score:3, Interesting)
In France and Canada, yes.
This is why Republicans want small government (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually our "wise" elected leaders do not pander merely to money, they pander to those without money just as well when the contribution-challenged represent a likely voting block. I'm about to use the "R' word, please try to keep your emotions in check and read the entire comment before firing off a flaming response. Thanks.
Democrats, the real one - not the one's running the show today, used to agree on that last point about federal strings. John F Kennedy, during the 1960 presidential debate, was against federal support of public schools for this reason. He argued that if the federal government helps it should be with one time costs, like construction of a school, and not with ongoing costs such as salary, books, etc. He warned that the later will invariable come with strings. As the US election season gets going keep an eye open for the 1960 Nixon/Kennedy debate on those political cable channel, or check youtube. It is awesome. Two intelligent candidates intelligently and substantively debating issues. We haven't seen that in a while, and it doesn't seem like we'll being seeing that any time soon either.
Re:I have another bill that should be passed (Score:2, Interesting)
This is the beginning of yet another very slippery slope. Students, stand up for your rights as citizens of the country you live in! You are not second class citizens, and yet they'd like you to be.
More legislation for the sake of big business. This is so sad on so many levels.
Re:Have another cigar fellas... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Homer (Score:3, Interesting)
http://listserv.educause.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0711&L=icpl&T=0&F=&S=&P=546 [educause.edu]
This tool they are talking about includes numerous network based tools they want Universities to install on their network. These tools CAN NOT detect ILLEGAL file sharing. They can only detect that file sharing is taking place. So what are Universities supposed to do? Watch the logs and when someone shares a file launch a raid on their room to check and see if that file was illegal or not? This is ridiculous.
Now the scary part. The Universitytoolkit is setup by default to allow unauthenticated access to the tools on the box via a web application. Someone from the network can anonymously view ALL traffic this system can see which includes web traffic, etc. If anyone has installed this toolkit you might want to do some more research.
Re:Where's the Constitutionality? (Score:4, Interesting)
As a college student, I've never quite understood how the economics of college work out the way they do. Tuition and fees for my school are $3,698.50 a semester for in-state students, and $9,887.50 for out-of-state students. There are roughly 16,000 students enrolled full-time from in state, and around 6,100 from out of state. So, from tuition alone, the school takes in about $59,176,000 twice a year from in-state students, and $60,313,750 from out-of-state students. I'm too lazy for better research right now (as I know the university gets money from the state, thus the lower tuition, and from other sources), but, if my multiplication skills are still good, my single school is directly charging 22,100 students $119,489,750 per semester.
On average, students take 5 classes a semester, so, by my reckoning, on average, students directly pay around $1000 per professor/class. Our student to faculty ratio is something like 16:1. Where does all the money go to here? Despite ever-increasing tuition, the school continues to run a deficit. Rather than update computer labs, students are simply told to bring their (required) laptop computers to labs. Textbooks are paid for by the student, sold at a profit by the university bookstore. I realize that facilities and education cost money, but it seems like someone, or everyone, is on the take here.
As a final note, on your point about student loans. It seems that any system set up to help poor people with something expensive just encourages raising the price. The system that has healthcare be hugely expensive, and solves that problem by paying a company whose sole purpose is to keep the status quo going, is crazily backwards. Same with education. Simply handing out money only strengthens the system. If colleges (or healthcare) are genuinely too expensive for many people, how is a subsidy on their current practices supposed to fix anything?
Re:sneaker net (Score:2, Interesting)
Its not that they don't buy music. Like me they will buy stuff to support the artists they like however this is a good way to get old tracks that are really hard to buy and also a great way to discover new music. The net effect is more of a win for the music industry then anything else. My buddies certainly would not go out of their way to purchase really old/inaccessible music and they might find something they like and start supporting that artist. Nothing lost, something potentially gained.
Flawed reasoning (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're implying that Backstreet Boys are popular because their fans pay for albums whereas the fans of more obscure bands do not, your reasoning is flawed. For one thing, as a band approaches obscurity, it would be increasingly difficult to find a p2p seed for their material. For another thing, taste tends to broaden with age, as do people's paychecks, making them more likely to turn to the more convenient amazon.com rather than lurking for hours in search of a seed for an early Bob Dylan album. Thirdly, label-constructed boy bands already dominated the airwaves before the advent of p2p.
It's more likely that the Backstreet Boys dominate the radio because if you want to make a lot of money with only one act or one station, your best bet is to appeal to large groups of people with homogenous tastes - not various groups of people with differing tastes.
In fact, leaving the low-bandwidth medium of radio to lowest common denominator acts and promoting more nuanced bands through the internet is probably the best way to do it from everyone's perspective. It's a waste of time for the labels to take on small bands, and it's a waste of time for the small bands to try to get signed to labels who aren't interested in them.
Re:Outdated business model cramping your style? (Score:2, Interesting)
I, as a musician myself (shameless plug [theaeonsaga.com]), would love people to hand out my band's copyrighted music like hotcakes. People showing up at shows and buying our wares is vastly more important than paying us $1/download or what have you for the music.
And as an afterthought: if a few people break the rules/laws, then they are in the wrong. If a LOT of people are breaking the rules/laws then perhaps the rules/laws are wrong.