Stop Congress From Breaking Higher Education Networks
Entertainment lobbyists have dumped a nasty trojan horse into the Higher Education bill scheduled for markup Wednesday in the House Committee on Education and Labor. On page 412 of the massive 747-page “College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007″ is a requirement that educational institutions spend their scarce resources to
develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.
So even as the committee asserts it wants to “make college more affordable and accessible,” it frustrates that purpose by letting Hollywood-driven mandates suck money away from the educational mission of colleges and universities. While “encourag[ing] colleges to rein in price increases,” the bill would force campuses to spend money exploring broken anti peer-to-peer technologies that make their networks less useful. Colleges that don’t fall into line risk losing federal student aid.
“Technology-based deterrents” are bound to be both over- and under-inclusive: blocking true educational uses while failing to stop piracy. A school cannot screen or filter all its Internet traffic without seriously impeding network innovation and research. If the “deterrents” block unknown communications, they stop students from experimenting on an end-to-end network, blocking the development of lawful peer-to-peer applications in the mold of Skype, distributed search, or LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), a library archival system. If they block encrypted traffic, they compromise privacy and security. If they don’t, they’re trivially circumvented.
Finally, there’s no automated way to determine whether “unauthorized” uses are fair. Even were a technology to have perfect access to all Internet traffic for comparison against a corpus of works, it would not be able to incorporate the judge necessary to determine whether a given use were fair, transformative, educational, or merely substitutive and unfair.
Half-baked ideas like these have no place in an education bill. Rather than forcing schools to spend scarce resources on entertainment companies’ agendas, Hollywood should do its own homework, offering students enough compelling, compatible alternatives that they choose authorized access.
Meanwhile, you should call congress to keep this mess out of our schools. Educause provides a page of resources including committee member phone numbers.
It would be incredibly resource-intensive for universities to try to screen all packets for evidence of encrypted data. They might try to block traffic on ports usually used for eg HTTPS but that will just lead applications to jump to non-standard ports…
Regardless, this harebrained screen is also being promoted in the UK by the recording industries and the responsible minister, Lord Treisman. We need a Drahos & Braithwaite Information Feudalism-style investigation of who exactly is pushing this “solution” across the US, UK and doubtless elsewhere.
Comment by Ian Brown — November 14, 2007 @ 6:25 pm
An actual solution would be that rolled out by Noank Media in China last month: have universities pay a fixed monthly fee per student for unlimited legal media downloads, and reward copyright holders according to the number of times their work is played. Noank licenses educational content and incorporates CC works to its library, and while I don’t think it accounts for fair use, it could determine things like which fraction of a work must be played for its author to be compensated.
Of course such an alternative licensing and distribution system doesn’t compensate owners of works it doesn’t license, but once sizable it can change student habits and encourage all owners to license their work through it. This is where the alternative lies - not in a costly technical war but in new set of incentives.
Comment by Mathieu Desruisseaux — November 16, 2007 @ 9:14 pm
Here’s my plan (Public domain - anyone can use):
Part I
1) Create a website on the University space that has links (or, what the hell, torrents) to some nice Public Domain music, movies and photos (beyond the Sonny Bono copyright act; circa 1910s or so)
2) Take out a 2-line classified in the university newspaper publicizing the new “alternative” to illegal downloading.
————–
Part II
1) Spend 5 minutes “researching technology-based deterrents”: reading 2600, Wired, and probably US News and World Report. Maybe.
DONE.
Comment by some guy — December 3, 2007 @ 10:22 am