College Anti-Piracy Law Goes Into Effect

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Provision of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 requires that colleges and universities put in place plans "to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material by users of the institution's network" or risk losing their eligibility for federal student aid.

The war against illegal file-sharing inched forward yesterday in dramatic fashion as a provision of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, passed by Congress back in August of 2008, went into effect yesterday. The provision requires that colleges and universities put in place plans "to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material by users of the institution's network" or risk losing their eligibility for federal student aid.

The Act forces campuses to use a "variety of technology-based deterrents" and to the "extent practicable, offer alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property."

RIAA president Cary Sherman hails the occasion as an "important signal" sent by Congress to force those education institutions who were previously reluctant to aggressively target file-sharing students to "get off the sidelines and help deal with the problem," as though eliminating campus P2P will have any tangible effect on the continued decline of music sales.

Students will still have access to Wi-Fi hotspots at local cafes, pubs, and restaurants. A great deal of students also live off campus and therefore unaffected by any campus P2P crackdown.

What's most troubling about the law is that it endangers federal student aid for the benefit of private business. There is no precedent.

Worse still, by the entertainment industry's own admission, Cyberlockers like Rapidshare "now represent the preferred method by which consumers are enjoying pirated content." P2P now has many forms, and programs like KaZaA, LimeWire, and Morpheus, the once dominant file-sharing programs the law was intended for, have been relegated to second class citizens.

All the Act will do is force colleges and universities to expend great annual sums on software and monitoring personnel that could otherwise be spent on education.

The RIAA quit suing individual file-sharers just four months after the Act's passage, opting instead to try and form voluntary partnerships with ISPs to implement a "three-strikes" regime targeting repeat infringers. The plan hasn't borne much fruit as ISPs are rightly leery of disconnecting loyal, paying customers to protect the business model of another company at the expense of its own.

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