Congress Passes Legislation Requiring Colleges to Fight P2P

Higher Education Act, which forces academic institutions to fight a problem that resides largely off campus and at the expense of its central mission - education, now only needs President Bush's signature to become law. Late last week Congress formally passed the Higher Education Opportunity Act requiring colleges and universities to determine how they will fight illegal file-sharing on campus. Now it only awaits the signature of President of Bush who is sure to sign it into law. Among the required provisions: ‘‘(i) an annual disclosure that explicitly informs students that unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including unauthorized P2P file-sharing, may subject the students to civil and criminal liabilities; ‘‘(ii) a summary of the penalties for violation of Federal copyright laws; and ‘‘(iii) a description of the institution’s policies with respect to unauthorized peer-to-peer file sharing, including disciplinary actions that are taken against students who engage in unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials using the institution’s information technology system; The bill's passage has already been widely condemned in many quarters by educational institutions and public policy advocates alike. The Common Solutions Group (CSG), a consortium of 25 educational institutions that includes some of this countries best and brightest like Harvard, UC Berkeley, Princeton, Brown, Stanford, Cornell, Columbia, Georgetown, and MIT, looked at the leading “infringement suppression” technologies and concluded that they were expensive, not very effective, and could suppress legitimate as well as infringing traffic.</img>


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