What Harry Reid Has Been Up To

Posted by Myrna the Minx on November 12, 2007 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Besides selling out on torture and caving to the Republicans on funding for the Iraq occupation, Reps. George Miller from California and Ruben Hinojosa of Texas have rewritten Harry Reid’s peer-to-peer file sharing amendment that was defeated last year into the College Opportunity and Affordability Act, or COAA. The COAA might force colleges and universities to not only provide deterrents to illegal file sharing by students in their networks, but also to provide alternatives in the form of subscriptions to file sharing services like Napster. From CNet news:

According to the bill, if universities did not agree to test “technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity,” all of their students–even ones who don’t own a computer–would lose federal financial aid.

The prospect of losing a combined total of nearly $100 billion a year in federal financial aid, coupled with the possibility of overzealous copyright-bots limiting the sharing of legitimate content, has alarmed university officials.

“Such an extraordinarily inappropriate and punitive outcome would result in all students on that campus losing their federal financial aid–including Pell grants and student loans that are essential to their ability to attend college, advance their education, and acquire the skills necessary to compete in the 21st-century economy,” a letter from university officials to Congress written on Wednesday said. “Lower-income students, those most in need of federal financial aid, would be harmed most under the entertainment industry’s proposal.”

The letter was signed by the chancellor of the University of Maryland system, the president of Stanford University, the general counsel of Yale University, and the president of Penn State.

They stress that the “higher education community recognizes the seriousness of the problem of illegal peer-to-peer file sharing and has long been committed to working with the entertainment industry to find a workable solution to the problem.” In addition, the letter says that colleges and universities are responsible for “only a small fraction of illegal file sharing.”

So not only does it appear that the Democrats are pushing an indirect rise in college fees in a bill that’s purpose is supposed to be the opposite, they are using federal financial aid programs as leverage for the movie and recording industries to collect revenue from students who may or may not be file sharing on the university and college networks.