The Flow of Consciousness

I dispatched this letter today, and I urge you to send a similar letter to your own member of Congress:

Congressman Jason Altmire
1419 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Congressman,

I just heard about a bill called the “College Opportunity and Affordability Act” which was introduced into the House of Representatives, or at least a committee of it, this past Friday, November 9. It was brought to my attention by a C|NET News article by Declan McCullagh entitled “Democrats: Colleges must police copyright, or else.” I have included a copy of this article for your perusal.

While I would have liked to have read the entire bill, it is 747 pages long, so I had to skim and search using keywords such as “copyright,” “theft,” and “digital.”

The parts of the bill which are of great concern to me—and concern is an understatement—are the entirety of Section 487 part A (found on approximately page 381) and Section 705 part A paragraph 10 (approximately page 475).

The former amends Section 485(a)(1) (20 U.S.C. 1092(a)(1)) , and, from my understanding, requires institutions to publicly post or otherwise remind students of the existence of and penalties for copyright infringement, as well as the steps the institution takes to prevent and detect digital copyright infringement. While it is good citizenship for an institution to remind its students of its own policies and state/federal law backing those policies, a law requiring it is outside the bounds of the federal government’s responsibility.

The latter reads

(10) the support of efforts to establish pilot programs and initiatives to help college campuses to reduce illegal downloading of copyrighted content, in order to improve the security and integrity of campus computer networks and save bandwidth costs;

My concern here is that the copyrighted content which is most often illegally trafficked is comprised of primarily music and movies, both of which are produced by major donors to political goings-on, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. I do realize that textbooks are also often illegally trafficked, but I do not recall any publicly announced civil or criminal lawsuits against traffickers of digital textbooks, or at least ones that garnered significant media attention from even independent news outlets.

Liaisons with corporations aside, the “security and integrity of campus computer networks” is not threatened by music and movie sharing. Audio and video files are data files and contain no executable code. This means that viruses, spyware, and other malicious programs do not enter campus networks by means of music and movie sharing, but possibly through security holes in software produced by companies such as Microsoft and Apple.

Additionally, bandwidth costs are ephemeral. Internet service providers to institutions bear the responsibility to raise prices if the institution itself does not upgrade its service of its own accord and distribute the difference in price to its students. That upgrade would raise students tuition at a medium-sized institution by perhaps two or three dollars per year, much less than the cost of implementing a system—in both raw money and man hours—to reduce bandwidth usage or punish students for misuse of the network.

However, I find Section 494 (approximately page 411) in its entirety to be wholly overbearing and excessive, and a needless intervention of the federal government in the matters between two industries. The federal government is taking the side of a for-profit giant with bottomless pockets and questionable motives and methods instead of the side of the mostly non-profit industry responsible for the education of young adults, or a better side to take: neither.

It is my understanding after having read the entirety of Section 494 that institutions which do not post policies and do not “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 deterrent to prevent such illegal activity” (494(a)(2)) will lose or be ineligible to gain federal funding for all students, regardless of whether or not a student has committed copyright infringement, or owns or even uses a computer. This provision is entirely atrocious. Revoking a student’s ability to get federal financial aid because the student’s institution lacks a plan to protect the interests of a private industry is simply ludicrous.

I hope that you, Congressman Altmire, understand the outrageousness of these sections and paragraphs and will work to strike them and related provisions entirely from the College Opportunity and Affordability Act authored by George Miller of California and Ruben Hinojosa of Texas. I also hope that, when it is about to be voted upon by the entire House, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act will be read in its entirety so that the members of congress will know exactly what they are voting on.

Thank you for hearing my concerns.

Sincerely,

Colin Dean

Enclosure: Copy of aforementioned article (two pages)

Ars Technica has excellent coverage of this atrocity.