Folks this is yet another of those silly "bring the mountain to me" type peices of potential legislation that as usual, comes at your expense.
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2008/jan/07/na-colleges-not-responsible-for-illegal-downloads/Should colleges become media policemen? That's exactly what would happen if the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007 were passed.
The bill as written deals primarily with federal college grants, loans and scholarships. It also includes, in Section 494, a provision increasing the responsibility of colleges for stopping illegal downloads and peer-to-peer transfers over the Internet of copyrighted material such as music, movies and TV shows.
The bill states that all participating schools will inform students and employees of the "policies and procedures" related to the illegal sharing of various media.
The secretary of education, however, will be empowered to give out grants on a competitive basis to schools that follow through on the procedures. This will likely entice many institutions that will then spend money and resources to implement such systems. Who are these costs going to be passed on to? The students, of course!
There are a number of reasons this bill should be opposed. It is a violation of student privacy. The government or any other surrogate organization should not be looking at the Web sites we go to. They should not be reading our e-mail and monitoring other Internet traffic because someone might be sharing a copyrighted song.
The entertainment industry should not go around complaining about a problem, going after college students in court, or enticing colleges to become media police - the industry should be productive and fix it.
Its unfortunately the same story over and over again, dubious "paid for politicians" supporting any peice of pro-Cartel legislation regardless of who's rights get trampled and as always often tied into tapping state or federal funding to pick up the tab for the media industry.
Lets look at this carefully folks, should your kids have their right to basic privacies that have been hard fought for, given away to save the likes of Dan Glickman and Cary Sherman doing a proper days work ?
Should they not have to work like the rest of us and pay proper taxes instead of hiding behind some charity law that means their organisations pay little to no tax, and then these same groups decide in their lack of wisdom to penalise young ppl who are not adults to gain publicity for their campaigns against file sharers, all at your expense ?
Any efforts to criminalise filesharing are designed simply to transfer the cost of launching lawsuits from the Cartel to the public, and we know whos purse they are looking at each time to pay for their anti constitutional schemes.
