Congress is spending my tax dollars to do what, exactly?

Apparently, the US House or Representatives doesn’t represent you or me. They represent the MPAA.

MPAA Washington general counsel Fritz Attaway suggested it’s reasonable to condition federal education funding on copyright enforcement efforts.

Of course he did. That’s why he’s the MPAA’s general counsel.

Embedded in the more-than-700-page bill is a requirement that universities devise plans for providing their students alternatives to illegal downloading and developing technology-based filters to keep offending content out of students’ hands in the first place.

I’m all for secure networks in colleges. I had the nightmare of being a system administrator for several UNIX machines and a Beowulf cluster while I was in grad school. I don’t mind schools doing what they need to do to preserve the bandwidth during normal operating hours, nor do I have a problem with filtering content on school-owned computers, such as those in offices or computer labs. I have a huge problem with a college charging a fee for internet service (as though they are an ISP) and then restricting content as if they were in loco parentis to their students.

If you read closely and go for the subtext, what the MPAA/RIAA is really pushing for is the sanctioned, school-provided alternative of a digital pay-per-song/movie download service. By forcing students to obtain their “fix” from one or even two places, they guarantee sales that they can’t secure in an open marketplace. By getting Congress to squeeze universities in their pocketbooks, the MPAA/RIAA is hoping that college will comply rather than fight.

That, boys and girls, is extortion.

We can argue First Amendment arguments all day. We can talk about fair use until we’re blue in the face, but the real crux of the argument is this: Are ISPs responsible for the use to which their networks are put? The original Napster was shut down. Then, file networks (like Gnutella and Limewire) were targeted. With the rise of BitTorrent and the subsequent anonymity of file transfers, the MPAA/RIAA had to change their tactics and force this argument to the front of our social discourse.

Now, do me a favor and glance quickly around your constituency. Did you ask you congressman to carefully consider the implications of how a potential for copyright infringement might be a threat to an established player in a rapidly changing marketplace? My guess is that your’e concerned about health care, the war in Iraq, and inflation. To have our congress even considering minutiae like this is both offensive and wrong. Law suits are finding limited traction in our courts, so since these organizations can’t sue their customers, they’re turning to the biggest demographic slice they can target–college students.

Don’t mistake this rant as a pro-piracy stance. As a creator of digital content, I expect (at this point) credit where credit is due. This mostly comes in accolades at this point, but there will come a day (sooner rather than later, I hope) where I will receive financial compensation for my work. I believe that my creative effort is indeed worth the percentage of royalties I will receive from each book sale and each download. However, if I find that my book(s) is highly susceptible to piracy, I will blame the individuals that choose to download the book…not the ISP, not the university they attend, not their parents, not the computer manufacturer, not the owner of the network that they’re on, and not the software package they’re using. I can also safely say that unless the offender is selling my work, odds are that I will do nothing to prosecute.