Provision of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 requires that colleges and universities put in place plans “to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material by users of the institution’s network” or risk losing their eligibility for federal student aid.
The war against illegal file-sharing inched forward yesterday in dramatic fashion as a provision of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, passed by Congress back in August of 2008, went into effect yesterday. The provision requires that colleges and universities put in place plans “to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material by users of the institution’s network” or risk losing their eligibility for federal student aid.
The Act forces campuses to use a “variety of technology-based deterrents” and to the “extent practicable, offer alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property.”
RIAA president Cary Sherman hails the occasion as an “important signal” sent by Congress to force those education institutions who were previously reluctant to aggressively target file-sharing students to “get off the sidelines and help deal with the problem,” as though eliminating campus P2P will have any tangible effect on the continued decline of music sales.
Students will still have access to Wi-Fi hotspots at local cafes, pubs, and restaurants. A great deal of students also live off campus and therefore unaffected by any campus P2P crackdown.
What’s most troubling about the law is that it endangers federal student aid for the benefit of private business. There is no precedent.
Worse still, by the entertainment industry’s own admission, Cyberlockers like Rapidshare “now represent the preferred method by which consumers are enjoying pirated content.” P2P now has many forms, and programs like KaZaA, LimeWire, and Morpheus, the once dominant file-sharing programs the law was intended for, have been relegated to second class citizens.
All the Act will do is force colleges and universities to expend great annual sums on software and monitoring personnel that could otherwise be spent on education.
The RIAA quit suing individual file-sharers just four months after the Act’s passage, opting instead to try and form voluntary partnerships with ISPs to implement a “three-strikes” regime targeting repeat infringers. The plan hasn’t borne much fruit as ISPs are rightly leery of disconnecting loyal, paying customers to protect the business model of another company at the expense of its own.
Stay tuned.
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Cary Sherman is a fag and Cary Sherman sucks the bag!
It won’t matter b/c you can get free piracy off of streaming sites & most people have their own internet & don’t use university.
I don’t know how this is going to work since they can’t block Bittorrent at a college. So much stuff that is part of normal curriculum (especially in computer studies) require stuff you would use torrents to get. Filtering doesn’t work without violating the students rights and also getting in the way of their education.
They can make all of the plans they want but the only solutions either get in the way of their education or are outright illegal. (like putting monitoring software on the students computers)
When I was in Uni doorms, I just used a 3G dongle for P2P, and the company I was with offered unlimated usage at night!
As a side note, you might mention that this will up the quantity of campus Sneaker nets, an already time honored tradition of good old fashioned bootlegging.
I have to say, of all the copyright infringements you’ll ever see, there are none as striking and costly as your average college LAN party. This will only further encourage students to take their hardcore piracy off-line whenever possible and continue to pirate larger and larger archives of data.
take an example: your current campus student downloads a handful of songs or an album or two a week, along with maybe a tv show they missed (and cannot stream) or a movie that just came out but their wallet is a little light this week…
Now, thats AN album, and A movie a week.
The campus closes off their access to these sources for entertainment and they start getting creative, talk to friends who live off campus, hit wifi hot-spots and download as much as they can while they can, and start creating a social network (gasp!) in the real world to supply them with this ill gotten booty… they meet new people, the subject comes up, they lament the failure of their school, the government and the MPAA and RIAA respectively, by which i mean they do not respect them in the slightest.. and they begin sharing COLLECTIONS of files rather than just an album or two, now they are copying entire libraries, discographies, genres.
This does have the benefit that it will open their eyes to all kinds of new music, new artists and could strengthen the fan base of a handful of good “word of mouth” artists, but now, the college students are disgruntled… read that again, let it sink in, the most disgruntled and recalcitrant population in our country are now further pissed off and now are going to stretch their rebellion to the furthest degree possible…
You’ll never sell these kids another album again. They already don’t want to buy your product. Now they wont buy out of spite.
This is already happening throughout campuses, I’ll give the RIAA some credit, their gross exaggerations of the damage they are being dealt by copyright offenders, aren’t so exaggerated as their detractors think. Actually, they might be right, cause I’m sure that at least 50% of the files being downloaded through websites, cyberlockers, (who came up with that lame ass name?) bittorrent, and traditional P2P (Kazaa and Limewire, DC++ and others) are also being burned off and passed around like candy on Halloween night.
There are students that have their laptops on them at all times, their are other students with their Ipods and Iphones and sync cables in their bag for just such an occasion as “Hey, what you listening to? lemme get a copy!” There are students who have 100gb portable HDDs and keep multiple terabytes in their dorm rooms for dumping. (I saw my first terabyte at a LAN party in 2002 or 2003, it was 8 brand new 160 gb hard drives raided together and connected by an erector set. The deservedly proud individual’s goal for the night was to fill it. I’m certain he did.)
This is only going to get worse.
When you close a door you open a window.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a college student full of spite hurtling down the hallway.