Congress to Fight Piracy with Education Funds

Found on Slashdot on Thursday, 05 April 2007
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The RIAA has announced that the House Education and Labor committee is considering an amendment, HR1689, to the Higher Education Act of 1965. The proposal would allocate federal education funds to anti-piracy measures on college campuses. Most concerning is the bill's wording. It's claimed that the proposal would "save telecommunications bandwidth costs." In other words, the government will fund private packet filtering and preferential bandwidth allocation. "The Higher Education Act (HEA) generally allows schools to spend the money they receive only on certain prescribed areas such as financial aid grants and Pell loans. The new bill would allow that money to be used for more things, but does not contain a request for additional funding. Whether schools would be interested in using a limited pool of federal money to police student file-swapping remains to be seen."

Nice tactic. Now that the industry fails more and more with the extortion lawsuits in courts, they shift to schools and universities. Fighting piracy is important to the industry only, so it's a little strange that the government should cash out money from education funds to fight it.