Q: Why does Hollywood care about student loans?

A: It doesn’t, but it does care about prosecuting students who trade movies online.

That explains why the Motion Picture Association of America might care about a press release issued last week praising, of all things, proposed legislation addressing higher education financing and access. The bill would require colleges to come up with ways to help movie studios and record labels prevent trading in copyrighted works.

The plan would require colleges to “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.”

It further would allow the secretary of education to offer grants to institutions “to develop, implement, operate, improve, and disseminate programs of prevention, education, and cost-effective technological solutions, to reduce and eliminate the illegal downloading and distribution of intellectual property.”

In the M.P.A.A. press release, Dan Glickman, the association’s chairman and chief executive, said, “Illegal downloading doesn’t just hurt the motion picture and music industries, but it can also be harmful to universities as it puts their systems at risk for security purposes, takes up bandwidth, and slows systems that are designed for research and other educational purposes.”

But that is not quite how universities see it. While they generally support a separate provision in the bill that would require them to disclose their policies on file-sharing and to inform students of what is and is not legal, they do not want to be in the position of having to block certain online activities by their students – even though they say they do not want their on-campus networks clogged by students’ illegally downloading copyrighted movies, television shows and music.

“You have the federal government requiring a nonprofit educational institution to develop plans to help a for-profit industry to earn more revenue from their students,” said Matt Owens, assistant director of federal relations at the Association of American Universities. “It makes no sense. That’s not what we’re in the business of doing.”

In a letter to George Miller, the California Democrat who is chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, top officials of four universities criticized the fact that the legislation is aimed at “colleges and universities — which industry leaders admit are responsible for only a small fraction of illegal file-sharing — but not other Internet service providers whose networks are associated with most of the problem.”

Then there is the problem of whether efforts to block illegal file-sharing might also block legitimate use, said Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School and the founding director of its Center for Internet and Society.



“The consequence of enforcement of these restrictions is to interfere with people’s legitimate rights to use those technologies,” Professor Lessig said.

Other provisions in the 700-plus pages of the bill, which is summarized here, involve the subjects you would expect, including grants for needy students and regulation of the student loan industry.



The committee is expected to vote on it as early as Wednesday.