Entertainment blacklist for US schools
p2pnet news | politics:- In the United States, universities now act as hard-core parent- and state-funded corporate entertainment industry marketing divisions and copyright enforcement agencies as well as teaching institutions.
This means these days, their students have a lot more to worry about than merely passing exams.
“American students, with the Big 4’s RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) breathing down their necks, already have more than enough to worry about,” p2pnet posted recently. “But things just got worse. They now have a US political group adding to the pressure.”
We were referring to the fact the House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, led by Hollywood Howard Berman, “gave universities ‘with high volumes of student piracy violations‘ 30 days to return a survey on so-called Net piracy and network practices”.
Flat out ’student piracy violations’ is so much more effective than mere ‘alleged copyright infringements’.
Now, senate majority leader Harry Reid, “is making waves with a planned amendment to the Higher Education Reauthorization Act being introduced in time for the next school year,” says Ars Technica. “Reid’s amendment holds select educational funds hostage for US colleges and universities that do not meet a set of criteria meant to bolster the war on file-sharing on college campuses. This is the legislative carrot-and-stick move that many colleges have feared would arise.
“The amendment would essentially put US colleges in the business of aggressively policing copyright on their network in order to stay off of a ‘blacklist’ that would be comprised primarily of RIAA and MPAA accusations.
The universities are, of course, already aggressively policing their students on behalf of the cartels.
“This Spring, 1,200 pre-litigation letters arrived unannounced at universities across the country,” said Charles Nessor, William F. Weld professor of law, Harvard Law School, and founder and faculty co-director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society; and John Palfrey, clinical professor of law and executive director, the Berkman Center, recently, going on:
The RIAA promises more will follow. These letters tell the university which students the RIAA plans on suing, identifying the students only by their IP addresses, the ‘license plates’ of Internet connections. Because the RIAA does not know the names behind the IP addresses, the letters ask the universities to deliver the notices to the proper students, rather than relying upon the ordinary legal mechanisms.
Universities should have no part in this extraordinary process.
And on IP addresses, “by itself an IP number on a packet has only suggestive value and is not reliable evidence at all,” says University of Chicago professor Mike O’Donnell”.
On Reid’s entry into the fray, “the US Secretary of Education would conduct an annual review of the top 25 file-sharing schools according to that ‘blacklist’ and place those schools on ‘probation’ pending their mandatory adoption of technological measures meant to block file-sharing,” says Ars Technica.
“According to the most recent version of the amendment, such schools must ‘provide evidence to the Secretary that the institution has developed a plan for implementing a technology-based deterrent to prevent the illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property’.”
It goes on:
The amendment does not address how copyright holders or their representatives such as the RIAA or the MPAA collect their data or represent it. It simply assumes that such data constitutes an objective assessment of comparative file-sharing activity at US schools. This is, of course, utter nonsense, because a school with 70,000 students will likely have more notices than one with 2,000 students.
As such, the bill smells like a favor to the anti-P2P tech industry, in that it’s basically lining up 25 enormous schools as new customers. Better yet, taxpayers will get to foot the bill, as more than 50 percent of the last RIAA Top 25 was comprised of state schools.
And where the US leads, sooner or later, the rest of the world follows.
Also See:
student piracy violations – Answer or else, RIAA tells universities, June 6, 2007
Ars Technica – Bill would force “top 25 piracy schools” to adopt anti-P2P technology, July 23, 2007
1,200 pre-litigation letters – RIAA student victimisation campaign, July 21, 2007
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