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Congress Forces Colleges to Crack Down on Illegal File-Sharing, Via Bribes

by Amar Toor on July 2, 2010 at 01:30 PM

jolly roger with graduation capThe halcyon days of freewheelin' file-sharing may be drawing to a quiet close today at universities across the country. As CNET reports, yesterday marked the final deadline for colleges receiving Title IV federal aid to comply with the anti-piracy measures outlined in the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) of 2008. The act covers a broad range of issues pertaining to higher education, but includes a few provisions that directly target illegal file-sharing among students. Institutions benefiting from HEOA, for example, must use technological deterrents to actively fight illegal downloading, and provide students with a clear explanation of copyright law and the consequences of breaking it.

Several colleges and universities have already begun implementing tougher measures to comply with the new guidelines, including the University of Kansas, where any student caught illegally downloading on the campus network can have his or her Web privileges suspended. At other institutions, repeat offenders can lose Web access entirely. As for schools lagging behind their draconian counterparts, RIAA president Cary Sherman says they'll likely get their act together, now that Uncle Sam has stepped in. "It's the first time ever in the history of dealing with the issue that Congress is holding schools accountable and requiring them to address the problem," Sherman says. "Here you have Congress saying 'Get off the sidelines and deal with the problem.' It's an important signal."

Legislation like this may be important, but the fact that its tacked onto a bill guaranteeing schools money is troubling. There's a word for using money to elicit a particular action; economists might call it "incentivizing," but realists would say "bribery." And considering the fact that many colleges are now faced with dwindling endowments and tighter budgets, it certainly seems like Congress and its complicit special interest groups are taking advantage of our universities at their neediest of moments. What a kid downloads in his free time has very little to do with his education. Being threatened with Internet probation, on the other hand, does. [From: CNET]

Tags: college, congress, crime, education, FileSharing, government, highereducationopportunityact, illegal, IllegalDownloads, law, p2p, piracy, riaa, top, university

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