College Campus Anti-P2P Legislation
The mighty behemoth recording industry appears to have achieved a new method of preventing illicit file sharing. As the practice of peer-to-peer transfers of music and movies files has increased, so too have the efforts of the Recording Industry Assocation of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to control or deter this.
The New York Times reports this week that a provision included in a college cost reduction bill will impose certain conditions on colleges and universities relative to file-sharing taking place on its networks. According to the NYT blog/article:
The plan would require colleges to “develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.”
It further would allow the secretary of the federal Education Department to offer grants to institutions “to develop, implement, operate, improve, and disseminate programs of prevention, education, and cost-effective technological solutions, to reduce and eliminate the illegal downloading and distribution of intellectual property.”
MPAA sent out a press release commending this provision. Conversely, the article links to a letter sent to the House Education and Labor Committee by officials from Yale, Stanford, Univ of Maryland and Penn State opposing the P2P provision. A representative from the Association of American Universities is quoted as stating “[y]ou have the federal government requiring a nonprofit educational institution to develop plans to help a for-profit industry to earn more revenue from their students. It makes no sense. That’s not what we’re in the business of doing.” Furthermore, the ubiquitous Larry Lessig expresses concerns that the controls the legislation envisions threaten to inhibit legitimate uses of internet technology.
A contact in the administration of Cornell University expressed concern about this to me. According to this source, only 18.5 percent of illicit file-sharing is taking place on campus now. Further, it was stated that the law not only would exact high costs on colleges to be compliant, it could also open the door for the colleges being held liable for the activity occuring on their backbones - through the perceived failure to adequately filter their services of copyright-violating material.
Yet, at the same time, campuses are a convienent and centralized target for the recording industry to focus its attention on. And nearly 1 of 5 violaters is still a high portion of the questionable file-sharing to occur in any one domain.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Buried within a must-pass higher education reauthorization bill, the provisions may prevail. Yet, there is a long path yet for it to go before it becomes law, and one shouldn’t doscount the voices of not only the colleges, but also the college students, in battling back provisions of this type.