Despite the MPAA's recent admission that its collegiate file-swapping numbers were wildly inaccurate, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act sailed through the House today by a 354-58 margin with its controversial intellectual property provisions still in place.

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. Not making such plans would carry no consequences, however, and we're told by House staffers that no one's federal financial aid is in danger.

Still, 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.

Intense opposition has also come from groups that believe the measure would cut federal funding to schools that don't comply (see this Santa Clara University newspaper article for an example).

While Congressional staffers insist this isn't true, others in Congress have gone so far as to offer amendments spelling it out explicitly. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) introduced and then pulled such an amendment yesterday, with his staff telling reporters that Cohen wanted to offer the amendment himself; when that proved impossible due to his travel schedule, he apparently decided to pull it. It's an odd explanation, but it's the only one were getting right now.

The White House yesterday also issued a "Statement of Administration Policy" that laid out its own objections to COAA. Most of these have little to do with technology (the Administration opposes any support for explicit racial quotas, for instance), though the document does say that the Administration will "work to address other concerns with the legislation." These other concerns include "addressing the information policy and technology requirements throughout the bill to ensure they are consistent with current Administration policies, and not duplicative of existing Federal programs."

Opponents of the bill's IP provisions had hoped that the MPAA's inaccurate numbers might derail that section of the legislation, but that does not appear to have happened. For the last several years, the MPAA has claimed that college students are responsible for 44 percent of film piracy "losses" in the US; after reviewing the numbers recently, though, the MPAA realized that a mistake had been made. The numbers have since been revised downward by nearly two-thirds.

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