February 7th, 2008
College Opportunity and Affordability Act passes...Napster anyone?
The College Opportunity and Affordability Act is a largely benign bill passed by the US House of Representatives Thursday that funds student financial aid, among many other pieces of higher education in the States. As Ars Technica points out, though,
COAA makes a host of changes to the higher education landscape in the US, but for our purposes, the most interesting was the requirement that schools make plans to offer some form of legal alternative to P2P file-swapping and that they also make plans to implement network filtering.
It is clear that penalties won’t be imposed yet for failure to comply with these provisions; however it certainly paves the way for future federal involvement in piracy policing on university campuses. Again, the author sums up the problem well:
the requirement that schools plan for filters and for legal music options is one that universities largely oppose. EDUCAUSE, which represents IT managers at more than 2,000 US universities, has consistently opposed to the provisions on the grounds that schools aren’t in the business of pushing commercial music services to students. When it comes to filtering, schools don’t like to block services with legal uses.
Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts and a member of the Internet Press Guild. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.
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