Intellectual Property Law

HR 4137, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act, passed the house. It seeks to reduce higher education costs, increases Pell Grants, and . . . seeks to elimitate peer-to-peer file sharing on college campuses. Yes, just what higher ed has been clamboring for, more money for students and an unfunded mandate to police their computer networks.

A late addition to the bill, Section 494, ?Campus-based Digital Theft Prevention,? seeks to end the sharing of copyrighted materials by college students. H.R. 4137?s full text can be found here (PDF), with Section 494 reading:

institutional policies and sanctions related to copyright infringement, including?

(i) an annual disclosure that explicitly informs students that unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including unauthorized peer-to-peer file sharing, may subject the students to civil and criminal liabilities; a summary of the penalties for violation of Federal copyright laws;

(iii) a description of the institution?s policies with respect to unauthorized peer-to-peer file sharing, including disciplinary actions that are taken against students who engage in unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials using the institution?s information technology system; and

(iv) a description of actions that the institution takes to prevent and detect unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material on the institution?s information technology system.

While I understand that copyright holders are looking to put the P2P genie back in the bottle any way possible, making schools monitor and screen/filter all network traffic (which is what ?actions . . . to prevent and detect? realistically means) is too onerous and just plain bad policy. The last thing campuses need is the overhead of another dozen servers and administrators just to monitor their traffic. Add to this the cost of purchasing filtering technology and some sort of update service, and the whole of this bill might just be opposite to its stated intent. That is to say, this will ultimately cost schools, and therefore students, more, not less. With this misguided (can I say boneheaded?) amendment, the cost of education will be anything but reduced.

This Democratic Congress has yet to do anything right (Nancy Pelosi screwed all of us when she took impeachment off the table). As much as I love being a member of the party, I am getting sick of the culture of appeasement that the party seems to think is needed to be leaders. Leadership is not rolling over for special interests like last century?s media barons looking to maintain their failing business model. Leadership is recognizing that the companies will succeed or fail on their own, and that this type of back door gift to media companies is the worst type of favoritism. I am still waiting for someone in the party to stand up and lead (and pithy platidudes from Barak is not leadership either). But then, in D.C., nothing ever seems to change.