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.'"
Why not (Score:4, Interesting)
Heck, just start a class that teaches "musical awareness," where you learn more about bands who distribute their music without the aid of said corporations.
hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Fascists (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Downloading music is perfectly legal. Perhaps you refer to downloading copyrighted music from RIAA signed bands? Why anyone would want to download music from major label musicians (much less buy that shit), is beyond me. I want to relate to an artists view of the world; I want to share their experiences and ideas through their music. Knowing that they signed to the RIAA disgusts me so much that I just can't listen to them anymore. They become corporate shills instead of real human beings.
Why should you get kicked out of school for smoking pot? It's safer than alcohol and tobacco.
Re:hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Meanwhile the lawmakers are drinking their double brandies and smoking their cigars (and tooting a little coke on the side)
This is just plain wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
This is the problem of the RIAA and MPAA not the government.
If the &^AA thinks they find individual probles , let them take action using civil law.
Subsidizing the biased terror tactics of the &^AA's and the BSA is clearly using our government power to unjustly enrich these greedy and evil entity's.
Public Funding of elections is what is really needed to stop this.
Cheers
There is a bigger problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Simply limit bittorrent? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is ridiculous (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the way we get artists paid is two fold.
First, I think that iTunes showed that if you make the online store easy enough to use, people would rather buy from there rather than steal music. I know that I'd much rather spend a buck to get a song I like there than hunt down a good copy on a P2P service. And now that I can get certain songs DRM free and at virtually CD quality, why would I even use a P2P service?
Second, the Internet has empowered artists to go directly to the people. Folks like George Hrab and Jonathan Coulton have made enough money on their "side projects" to quit their day jobs. In fact, Jonathan Coulton has said that he makes more per month than the Dresden Dolls, who are signed to a major label.
So by making a distribution method easy for customers and artists alike, we create an environment where artists get money directly from the customers without going through hoops. And because the overhead is extremely low, there's no reason a good artist couldn't make a decent living.
The reason the record industry is failing to help smaller artists is because the old record industry had so much overhead. Between studio time, promotions, pressing the albums, and having so many people at so many levels taking a cut, the artists never really got rich unless they sold millions of albums.
Granted, this new music industry, and indeed the new content industry as a whole, won't make anyone super rich, but it will spread the wealth amongst many more artists, and create a system where exposure to artists is mostly word of mouth.
That is if the record companies don't succeed in smothering it in its crib.
Mnemonic... (Score:1, Interesting)
If RIAA (sony,universal,emi,warner) = RIAA SUE W , then we can take it further...
W = Double "U"
"Double U" = 2 U's = "RIAA SUE U2" = The question we eventually will ask each other :
"RIAA sue you, too?"