Tennessee to foot $9.5 million RIAA bill!
p2pnet news view | RIAA News:- “In what has to be one of the most shocking examples of an American politician blatantly aligning himself with hardcore commercial interests, Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen has signed into law a bill aimed at, ‘curbing the disproportionate amount of music theft occurring on state campus networks via peer-to-peer (p2p) services’,” said p2pnet last week.
The words were those of the RIAA, but behind the bill were Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG, and behind them is a bill of another kind, and it’s shocking in its proportions.
“It’s fitting that on the day the world focuses on Nashville and country music that Tennessee would take the lead in protecting the creativity that this state so uniquely inspires,” RIAA master spinster Mitch Bainwol (left) told Bredesen.
Meanwhile, as p2pnet has often pointed out, when the Big 4 and their RIAA call the shots, they expect their victims to fork out for the ammunition.
And this time, Tennessee taxpayers are expected to pay through the nose to help the labels force Tennessee students into becoming good little consumers of corporate ‘product’ —- to the tune of an eye-popping $9.5 million, plus $1.5 million a year and thereafter!
Says the EFF’s (Electronic Frontier Foundation) Richard Esguerra »»»
While the entertainment industry failed to get “hard” requirements for universities in the Higher Education Act passed by Congress earlier this year, the RIAA succeeded in Tennessee (and is pushing in other states) with this provision that gives Big Content the ability to hold universities hostage through the use of infringement notices.
Moreover, the new rules will cost Tennessee a pretty penny — in the cost review attached to the Tennessee bill, the state’s Fiscal Review Committee estimates that the new obligations will initially cost the state a whopping $9.5 million for software, hardware, and personnel, with recurring annual costs of more than $1.5 million for personnel and maintenance. Not a penny of this will go to artists, nor to any of the record labels RIAA represents.
Unfortunately, the entertainment industry lobby seems to be succeeding, bit-by-bit, in persuading legislators to coerce universities into buying “infringement suppression” technologies — expensive technologies that won’t stop file sharing on campus networks. Even if the technologies did work (magical thinking in light of encryption), does anyone think they would somehow force students back into record stores or the iTunes Store? After all, today students on campus can swap multiple gigabytes hand-to-hand for pennies (see, e.g., blank DVD-R disks, or the price of portable hard drives, as well as the ease of copying from iPod to iPod).
It makes no sense to force universities to spend millions on technologies that will hobble innovation on campus while failing to stop file-sharing. Why not use those millions to compensate creators and copyright owners, and thereby make file-sharing legal, instead? Now, more than ever, the universities need to come forward with a collective licensing proposal that will protect their campus communities and their own bottom lines.
Meanwhile, universities under the gun should make sure to shun the hype of network filtering when possible and seek solutions more amenable to teaching and academic freedom — our whitepaper on copyright infringement technologies on campus networks is a good place to start. For more detail, EDUCAUSE has in-depth resources on P2P, file sharing, and the Higher Education Act.
How does the bill break down?
$9,515,000/One-Time
$1,650,000/Recurring /FY08-09
$1,969,500/Recurring/FY09-10 and Succeeding Years
- Costs would include the implementation of a solution that blocks peer-to-peer (P2P) with certain network traffic signatures that can distinguish between illegal P2P options and legal options.
- Notification to users when they sign onto the network would occur when they receive their network ID and possibly once a year thereafter.
- First year costs to the University of Tennessee system would include a one-time cost of $200,000 for monitoring software and a recurring cost of $75,000 for one staff position and benefits to monitor network traffic.
- First year costs to the Tennessee Board of Regents system include a one-time cost of $2,794,500 for monitoring software, a one-time cost of $6,520,500 for monitoring hardware and a recurring cost of $1,575,000= for 21 staff positions and benefits (@$75,000 each) to monitor network traffic.
- FY09-10 and thereafter recurring costs to the University of Tennessee system include an annual software maintenance cost of $40,000.
- FY09-10 and thereafter recurring costs to the Tennessee Board of Regents system include an annual software maintenance cost of $279,450.
Definitely stay tuned.
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p2pnet – Tennessee governor turns RIAA copyright cop, November 13, 2008
EFF – RIAA Wins, Campuses Lose as Tennessee Governor Signs Campus Network Filtering Law, November 17, 2008
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November 18th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
they should make Phil Bredesen (read Asshat) pay the implementation. That would have put an instant kibosh on the this fantasy law.
November 18th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
yay! go us! :/
so happy my state can protect private interests like this, and throw the public ones down the drain.
November 18th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
A law pushed for by lobbyists who don’t know anything about computers, passed by politicians who don’t know anything about computers, and administrated by twenty-two screen monkeys who don’t know anything about computers. Just another easily circumvented anti-PvP boondoggle.
So why didn’t Tennessee just give the money to the RIAA? Well, maybe they did. Let’s follow the money. If those monitoring software/hardware purveyors and twenty-two screen monkeys don’t have recording industry connections, I’ll be shocked.
November 18th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Hey Bredesen, ever heard of Peer Guardian? Of course not. Go kiss more music row butt, and waste our money, you fool.
November 19th, 2008 at 2:33 am
The more i read about these campus enforcement deals the more it makes me wonder in what direction they are pushing the little geniuses on campus. I mean get a campus full of IT people and block access to somethin they like and watch them go to work dismantling your system and building safeguards that you can’t put it in place… ever again. These are the people who will design, build and implement the next gen of networks. Now ask yourself how do you want them to do that? What motivation do you want them to have?
November 19th, 2008 at 4:55 am
country music is not creativity
November 19th, 2008 at 5:07 am
Amazing info indeed! Here in Sweden we have had it up to here [stretching my arm to the ceiling] with MAFIAA and copyright lobbyists. At the time the EU-originating IPRED is to be implemented and large partions of the Swedish population is in an uproar similar to earlier this year when the FRA-surveillance law was passed (FRA is NSA:s Swedish liaison).
@Dude from Finland: I read what you write but perhaps with a little more positivity in mind…because can the motivation factor get any better?
The future looks bright. 
Then again, seeing how our politicians does not seem to grasp the conditions of the information era we might as well head into a time when Internet as we know it is no more.
Keep up the good work!
Cheers,
Thomas (member of the Swedish Pirate Party)
November 19th, 2008 at 6:31 am
@Thomas Tvivlaren
My questions were aimed more at the people who design and implement these measures than us here. I know what will happen once they implement these kind of measures all around. You got a bunch of people motivated to find any way to bypass that system. And I’m not talking about any small number either. I’m quite positive that these individuals/groups will find a way to bypass almost any Big Brother type of system, especially since they outnumber the service providers by 100 to 1 at least. As long as there is a will, there is a way.
November 19th, 2008 at 10:35 am
I sent Phil Bredesen a letter stating he owes the people $9,515,000/One-Time, $1,650,000/Recurring /FY08-09, $1,969,500/Recurring/FY09-10 and Succeeding Years, plus interest and damages for his illegal actions
November 19th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Tennessee must be rich if they can afford to flush this much cash with no discernible benefit to the state.
November 20th, 2008 at 2:49 am
1. Another bailout for faltering corporate giants. No offense, Jon, but how exactly is this newsworthy?
It’s obvious that — despite the cartoonish inanities of our erstwhile pal “Sam” — The “capitalist” class in this country — and probably everywhere else — would be scared shitless by a genuinely “Free” market.
Ask just about any “Free market” apologist, and you learn very quickly that the only “government interventions” they don’t like are those which inconvenience them/empower their employees/keep people safe/hold them responsible for their company’s actions.
They hate safety regs, and the most hard-core of them (self-described “Libertarians” and “Objectivists” mostly, but a goodly swath of Republicans as well) explicitly defend the “right” of places like restaurants and hotels to discriminate against racial minorities.
Patents and copyright are ALL ABOUT the State dictating who is permitted to use “content” — up to and including business models and parts of the human genome.
And, lest we all forget this fact, when they’ve raped and pillaged and destroyed as much as they can possibly destroy, THEN they run to the government for multi-billion dollar bailouts.
I wonder if government subsidized the buggy-whip industry, too.
November 20th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
hey jon.
nice post. I add my own two cents on the RIAA and how it must be beaten into submission here: http://blogs.computerworld.com/riaa_tax
cheers,
dt
December 6th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Two caveats I see:
1. The cost is way too high for just blocking some P2P filesharing, IMO. Really, if this technology is needed to enhance revenue of record producers, they could find an affordable and efficient way to accomplish their objective on their own nickel.
2. Such an expensive infrastructure at taxpayer expense makes me feel that RIAA, et. al. are acting as a front for a massive data monitoring and gathering system, at taxpayer expense, which can destroy any semblance of privacy, and completely throttle communication at a politician’s whim. So much for “Freedom of Speech”! Under this pretense, even encryption of private messages between individuals may be interpreted as “deliberate and malicious circumvention of copy protection means” under the DMCA.