In recently passing a bill to please the copyright nazis's, the first casualties have appeared, students rights to even basic freedom of speech and privacy has been sold down the river by those tasked with protecting them.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080225-tennessee-legislation-would-turn-schools-into-copyright-cops.htmlA new bill proposed in the Tennessee state senate aims to reduce copyright infringement at universities by forcing the schools to become anti-piracy enforcers. If passed, the bill would require universities that receive funding from the state to analyze all traffic passing through their networks in order to track down and stop infringing activity. Under the proposed bill, universities could lose state funding if they refuse to implement network analysis systems or if they receive ten or more infringement complaints from content owners during a single year.
Many questions remain unanswered about the extent to which piracy occurs on college campuses. The MPAA recently retracted the outrageously inflated college piracy statistics that it published after a 2005 study. Despite the fact that the MPAA's numbers were egregiously inaccurate, the study has been repeatedly cited by lawmakers.
Universities understandably complain about the high costs of acquiring and operating network analysis tools. In an attempt to make it easier for schools to shoulder the burden of anti-piracy enforcement efforts, the MPAA created a toolkit last year that aimed to automate much of the process. The toolkit, however, was built using open source software and failed to comply with software's license. After the MPAA refused to take down the software and comply with copyright law, one of the developers sent a DMCA takedown notice to the organization's Internet service provider. The MPAA claimed that it would make the toolkit available again after resolving the copyright issues, but still hasn't done so
This makes the activities of the MPAA/RIAA folks clear, they want you to respect
their copyrights but they will not respect yours.
Theses ppl are nothing more than theives from the artist and consumer alike, their sole motivation is derived from extracting revenue for their shareholders regardless of cost to the wider community, even now your funding their efforts as they slowly shift the burden of having to actually prove their ridiculous claims onto the governments tab, a tab that your going to have to pick up the cost of in increased taxes, do theses parasites ever pay for anything themselves ?
The answer is no, even their mouthpeice organisation the RIAA is a non tax paying "non profit", does this seem strange to you folks ?
Now lets get down to the nitty gritty here, which company is the favoured supplier of campus filtering technology ? Why yes its the company owned by our old friend Dr Doug Jacobs who is the so-called "expert witness" for the RIAA, so once again folks your paying the RIAA via the backdoor in student fees, yet another bite of the ever increasing covert tax burden on society of the content industry.
