Congress to Fight Piracy with Education Funds 163
Nomihn0 writes "The RIAA has announced that the House Education and Labor committee is considering an amendment, HR1689, to the Higher Education Act of 1965. The proposal would allocate federal education funds to anti-piracy measures on college campuses. Most concerning is the bill's wording. It's claimed that the proposal would 'save telecommunications bandwidth costs.' In other words, the government will fund private packet filtering and preferential bandwidth allocation. 'The Higher Education Act (HEA) generally allows schools to spend the money they receive only on certain prescribed areas such as financial aid grants and Pell loans. The new bill would allow that money to be used for more things, but does not contain a request for additional funding. Whether schools would be interested in using a limited pool of federal money to police student file-swapping remains to be seen.'"
Re:So instead of... (Score:5, Informative)
Not a common carrier (Score:5, Informative)
It's not a common carrier because the only people who have any access to the network are people who attend the school or work there. In dorm rooms, the university simply extends the privilages to those in the dorms and provides you a more liberal usage policy as compared to a business.
John Q. Smith on the street can't simply walk into campus and say "give me a connection." There may be some gray areas here, such as extending service to alumni or some other groups, but in general campus ISPs are not considered common carriers.
Link to explination of the bill (Score:1, Informative)
"Illegal downloading of music and movies on college campuses is harming their computer networks by consuming a huge amount of education-related bandwidth"
"There are numerous options to download music legally - online retailers such as iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody and eMusic charge varying amounts for song and album downloads."
I guess the legal music services don't use up bandwidth.