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Consumerist: College
beatharvard.jpgOf all the Ivy League schools, Harvard is the only one to have escaped the deluge of RIAA pre-litigation letters. What gives?

Ars Technica speculates:
There may be another factor at work here: hostility towards the RIAA's campaign on the part of Harvard Law School professors Charles Nesson and John Palfrey, who run the law school's con_westpointisfree.jpg Want a college education but don't want to go into debt over it? If your interests happen to coincide with the specific curricula at miller.jpgArs Technica is reporting that there is a provision in a massive new education bill that would punish schools that don't police p2p traffic on their networks by cutting federal financial aid. In addition, the bill requires that schools offer an industry approved alternative to file sharing, such as Napster or Rhapsody.

From Ars Technica:
Under the terms of the act, which is cosponsored by Rep. George Miller (D-CA) and Rep. Ruben Hinojosa (D-TX), schools will have to inform students of their official policies about copyright infringement during the financial aid application and disbursement process. In addition, students will be warned about the possible civil and criminal penalties for file-sharing as well as the steps the schools take to prevent and detect illicit P2P traffic.

That's not all: schools would have to give students an alternative to file-sharing while evaluating technological measures (i.e., traffic shaping, deep packet inspection) that they could deploy to thwart P2P traffic on campus networks. Many--if not most--schools already closely monitor traffic on their networks, with some (e.g., Ohio University) blocking it altogether, and the bill would provide grants to colleges so they could evaluate different technological solutions.

The most objectionable part of the bill is the part that could force schools into signing up for music subscription services. In order to keep that beloved federal aid money flowing, universities would have to "develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property." Have we no worse educational problems to worry about? Is Congress really prepared to tell a school, "Sorry, you've lost your funding because Billy is letting people download music on your network?"

MPAA chairman and CEO Dan Glickman is:
"Intellectual property theft is a worldwide problem that hurts our economy and costs more than 140,000 American jobs every year," said Glickman in a statement. "We are plea