Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is making waves with a planned amendment to the Higher Education Reauthorization Act being introduced in time for the next school year. Reid's amendment holds select educational funds hostage for US colleges and universities that do not meet a set of criteria meant to bolster the war on file-sharing on college campuses. This is the legislative carrot-and-stick move that many colleges have feared would arise.

The amendment would essentially put US colleges in the business of aggressively policing copyright on their network in order to stay off of a "blacklist" that would be comprised primarily of RIAA and MPAA accusations. More disturbing, the US Secretary of Education would conduct an annual review of the top 25 file-sharing schools according to that "blacklist" and place those schools on "probation" pending their mandatory adoption of technological measures meant to block file-sharing. According to the most recent version of the amendment, such schools must "provide evidence to the Secretary that the institution has developed a plan for implementing a technology-based deterrent to prevent the illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property."

The amendment does not address how copyright holders or their representatives such as the RIAA or the MPAA collect their data or represent it. It simply assumes that such data constitutes an objective assessment of comparative file-sharing activity at US schools. This is, of course, utter nonsense, because a school with 70,000 students will likely have more notices than one with 2,000 students.

As such, the bill smells like a favor to the anti-P2P tech industry, in that it's basically lining up 25 enormous schools as new customers. Better yet, taxpayers will get to foot the bill, as more than 50 percent of the last RIAA Top 25 was comprised of state schools.

The Digital Freedom Campaign had harsh words for the amendment. "No one supports illegal downloading or file sharing, but the Digital Freedom Campaign and its members believe that Universities have more urgent things to do with their scarce budgets than collect information on their students for the government and for the RIAA," said Jennifer Stoltz, a spokesperson for the Digital Freedom Campaign. "Academic resources would be better spent educating students rather than spying on them at the behest of large corporations." The DFC is behind an attempt to educate college-goers about their rights under the law.

Senator Reid's amendment has undergone several revisions and may be revised again before it is voted on. A major IT officer with a Boston-area university told me that there are concerns that Reid wishes to expand the requirements so that more schools would be required to adopt technology aimed at stifling file-sharing, but that there is no clear method for doing this without making it mandatory for everyone. One option would be to set a threshold of infringement notices per year.

The amendment could be introduced as early as tomorrow, and it is certainly expected to be up for a vote before the close of the week. If this sounds like bad news to you, you should contact your Senators. Remind them that anti-file-sharing technology is not proven to work and is in fact it known to interfere with plenty of legitimate uses, as we have reported earlier.

P2P arms race, here we come!

Update: Senator Reid's office confirms that the Senator has dropped the amendment without explanation. It's dead, for now!