For over a year, the RIAA has been going after file sharing on college campuses via the courts (it sent out another 569 "prelitigation settlement letters" just last week). Last year saw Big Content turn the pressure up on Congress to do something about P2P on college campuses: namely, trying to get legislation enacted that forces schools to act as copyright cops on the industry's behalf. A bill that includes this language passed the House of Representatives in February, while at least two states are considering bills with suspiciously similar language. The academic world seems to have become concerned about these bills, and is starting to do its own lobbying.

On the federal level, the bill in question is H.R. 4137, termed the College Opportunity and Affordability Act; it's awaiting consideration by the Senate. It's a bit of a monster, weighing in at over 800 pages, but it takes a number of steps that are intended to make college affordable, such as streamlining the financial aid process and encouraging states to fully fund their university systems.

As with most bills of this scope and complexity, it's been easy to slip additional and seemingly unrelated provisions in. The relevant one is Section 494, which addresses, "Campus-Based Digital Theft Prevention." It states that any campus receiving money through the program should, "develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity." Although the phrasing suggests that these provisions are mandatory, Congressional staffers have assured Ars that this isn't the case.

Both of these provisions appear to be real losers, from a college's perspective. The first seems to promote the equivalent to the all-campus Napster subscriptions that generally raised fees on students and then proved less popular than commercial alternatives. The clear irony here is that a provision that's likely to increase student costs has been tucked into a College Affordability Act. The academic community, however, is more perturbed by the second provision, which calls on it to start invasive policing of on-campus network traffic.

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus has been tracking letters sent in protest to the House and Senate from the American Council on Education and the Association for Computing Machinery. The ACE points out (PDF) that studies suggest the availability of legal alternatives doesn't significantly reduce file sharing, and questions whether it's a big problem anyway, as the MPAA's revised numbers indicate that only three percent of its losses involve campus networks.

The ACM writes in (PDF) to let Congress know that technological solutions don't actually work well. Deep packet inspection will simply set off an encryption arms race with the developers of file sharing software and, even when effective, can't tell copyright infringement from legitimate use. If it's put into place, filtering will add a layer of complexity and insecurity to campus networks, and has the potential to inhibit the free interchange of academic material.

Getting the states to take action

Apparently recognizing that Congress might not actually pass this bill in its current form, action has commenced at the state level. We previously reported that Tennessee was considering a law that required campus IT staff to act as network police. Now, Illinois is considering a bill with a nearly identical provision: get ten infringement notices, and you have to install some form of deterrent system on the campus network.

Try to follow the logic here. State schools are getting less affordable as cash-strapped states cut their support. Congress is trying to force the states to provide them better support. But both Congress and the states are trying to tie the financial relief to policies that promote campus expenditures on a technological arms race with the developers of file-sharing software.