May102008
Colleges fret RIAA push for state anti-P2P laws »
From CNet News:
The entertainment industry’s controversial efforts to get universities to be more proactive about policing peer-to-peer piracy have begun to spread from Capitol Hill to the states.
Earlier this year, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a Hollywood-backed proposal buried in a higher education reauthorization bill that would require universities receiving federal financial aid funding to devise plans for “alternative” offerings to unlawful downloading—such as subscription-based services—or “technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.”
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“Technological deterrents” vs. Copyright 101
That was the experience related by Thomas Danford, chief information officer for the Tennessee Board of Regents, a governance organization that covers 19 public colleges and universities inside the state. If it weren’t for the close scrutiny of his organization’s legislative committee, Tennessee universities may have been stuck with much less savory obligations related to managing peer-to-peer file sharers on their network, he said.The original version of the Tennessee bill (PDF), which Danford said was penned by a local RIAA lobbyist, would have required universities to effectively play copyright cops on their networks. It dictated that they must employ “effective technology-based deterrents, to prevent the infringement of copyrighted works over the school’s computer and network resources, including over local area and internal networks.”