Rich Fiscus
28 Jul 2007 8:36
Last Monday US Senator Harry Reid withdrew a proposed amendment to a renewal of the Higher Education Act, which provides financial aid to US college students. The amendment would have required colleges to crack down on illegal file sharing.
The Reid amendment also would have required the education secretary to annually identify (and publicly embarrass) the 25 colleges and universities that had in the previous year received the most notices of copyright violations using institutional technology networks.
Unless it was a response to lobbying from the entertainment industry, the reasoning behind this is puzzling since these notices are really just complaints from outside parties claiming copyright infringement; in other words allegations that haven't been proven in court.
College officials had lobbied aggressively against the Reid provision, arguing that it would require colleges to buy unproven software or hardware and that it ignored the many efforts that higher education institutions have been taking to attack the problem of illegal downloading.
One IT official at a Boston-area school noted that the proposal would have created a kind of "revolving door" for anti-P2P software companies who would have, in effect, been guaranteed 25 new customers each year.
The amendment was replaced by one requiring schools to simply publish notices to students explaining why illegal file sharing is bad.
Source: Ars Technica