This report I,m reading today spells out rather starkly what happens when the "good" folks sit around and take no action when unjust laws are proffered and helped along by big business donations to politicians, society as a whole suffers and in this case its your wallet and your childs education.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081020-p2p-compliance-schools-see-red-as-they-shell-out-the-green.htmlThough US colleges and universities don't appear to be contributing to the file-sharing epidemic any more than traditional ISPs, higher education has been explicitly singled out by federal laws designed to crack down on P2P. The Higher Education Act that reauthorized federal loan programs passed earlier this year, stuffed with a couple of key provisions designed to make schools take the issue seriously and draw up plans to confront it. But dealing with P2P on campus carries real costs—and a new study from the Campus Computing Project lays them all out.
The real costs of P2P compliance come from two main areas: paying IT and legal staff, on the one hand, and paying for traffic-shaping gear and software on the other. These can both be major expenses; private universities spent more than $100,000 on average last year just for software licensing fees. They spent another $100,000 on special P2P hardware costs, and another $143,000 on "other direct costs" in anti-P2P equipment. Even for a large school, this isn't pocket change.
The report concludes that the costs at large institutions could top "half a million dollars annually."
It seems the failure of folks to protest and derail this draconian legislation means all centers of learning now pay for the upkeep of virtually the RIAA's entire legal team who use that revenue to generate false infringement claims and bully the poor and those unable to defend themselves into paying a "penalty", you,ll notice well off folks never have any such legal problems and have these extortion claims tossed by their lawyers, it seems only the poor are hit hard and now it seems forced via a back door method to bankroll those who oppress them.
Sometimes its no good waiting for your neighbour to take the lead in standing up for your rights, often your neighbour is likley to be waiting for you to lead the way.
