HR 4137. WTF?! Bill to punish all students.

Seen on Digg, here, and also on CNET, here, and also here on Ars Technica. From the article…

New federal legislation says universities must agree to provide not just deterrents but also “alternatives” to peer-to-peer piracy, such as paying monthly subscription fees to the music industry for their students, on penalty of losing all financial aid for their students.

What the hell is this??!! Is this article to suggest that top Democrats in Congress would propose to punish ALL students who receive Federal aid and in effect sacrifice / destroy the opportunity for many students to receive education at the whim of the music / movie industry? How absolutely reprehensible and abhorrently pathetic. An extreme example of lobbying hurting education, our youth, and America — for profit, plain and simple.

File sharing, P2P, BitTorrent, etc were prolific when I was in college and it requires no overt skill to recognize their continued (exponential) expansion. Many efforts, however, have been made by the RIAA (CRIA in the example) to combat distribution channels, including shutting down aggregation [torrent] sites, filing lawsuits against individual distributors, colleges, and also against individual users. I won’t try to defend piracy… but will suggest that people do it for a very simple reason: things are expensive (i.e. times are tough, i.e. the USD sucks), and usually retail prices are absurd. For example, the iTunes lesson: ‘people would prefer to obtain things legally if prices seem reasonable’. Steve Jobs has done an excellent job of combating the music / movie industry and their continued efforts to increase prices (i.e. read here about Apple vs NBC). Doing so would revert people to piracy. What is upsetting is that the music / movie industry knows this, why else would they be selling DVDs for $3 in China (US prices were $14.99-24.99 last I checked, hmm).

Well, that last part was kind of a tangent, but back to HR 4137. If this is indeed the case and something that Congress is considering, it needs to make headline news (CNN, Google, NY Times, are you listening?!). Punishing all students, with the explicit ramifications of students losing funding, is inappropriate, ridiculous, and unacceptable.