The MPAA has a bee in its collective bonnet about collegiate piracy, and the group isn't about to let anything so banal as "facts" get in the way of some cathartic outrage. How else to explain the fact that the group continues to petition members of Congress for special favors that would force colleges to make plans for offering up legal music services to students and for implementing copyright filters after the MPAA's own data shows that schools have little to do with the overall problem? In a new letter this week, the MPAA continued to push its agenda in Congress, arguing that filters aren't just good for the movie business, they're good for the schools.

The College Opportunity and Affordability Act sailed through the House last month. The bill contains a reauthorization of key federal funding for student aid, and the MPAA managed to pack the House version with a pair of provisions that the colleges and universities in question want nothing to do with. Another version of the bill without those provisions was passed by the Senate, and the two chambers are currently trying to hash out a compromise bill.

On March 11, the American Council on Education sent a letter (PDF) on behalf of 13 higher-ed groups to Congressional leaders, urging them to reject the controversial language. ACE said that schools had no problem telling their students about copyright and the legal and institutional penalties for violating it. But the schools did object to wording that would "require institutions to develop plans to provide alternative music and movie services and implement technological measures to deter illegal file sharing."

That letter pointed out that the MPAA had recently revised its own collegiate piracy numbers downward, now saying that students accounted for 15 percent of revenue lost to piracy (instead of 44 percent). But as ACE points out, only 20 percent of US college students live on campus and so "only 3 percent of MPAA losses can be attributed to college students using the campus networks." (The MPAA recently reported record box office revenue, indicating that piracy concerns, though real, aren't killing the movie business.)

The point was clear: schools don't believe that they should face special obligations under the law when the part of the problem they have control over is miniscule.

The MPAA shot back this week with a letter of its own. The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus blog obtained a copy of the letter, which says in part, "One filtering product is now deployed at approximately 70 colleges and universities across the country, and it has demonstrated the ability to impede illegal P2P activity on a number of campus networks." An unnamed school also "saved $1.2-million a year in terms of bandwidth and $70,000 in personnel costs" after using filters.The group wants Congress to keep the two provisions.

ACE argued that filters are "largely ineffective," and of course schools aren't anxious to have network management practices dictated to them by interested industries.

In an interview with a University of Minnesota official last week, I was told that P2P apps played an important role in numerous on-campus projects, especially those that dealt with huge scientific data sets. The university's preferred response to the piracy problem is to tell students what's legal and what is not, then set per-dorm bandwidth limits that are high enough for comfortable student use but low enough that the university's fat pipe won't turn into a superhighway for every P2P system on the planet.

In no way is the policy meant to create a file-swapping haven (the school has to pay a "team of lawyers" to deal with letters from the RIAA and others already, and isn't eager for more of the same). Instead, it's designed to minimize problems for the school and for academic users while at the same time giving students the information they need to make (hopefully) responsible decisions.

The MPAA is right about one thing: bandwidth is expensive, and colleges know it. But it's wrong to suggest that schools aren't taking strong, proactive steps to minimize illicit file-swapping while still keeping the network as open as possible. We took a detailed look at the issue last year and found that most schools already have policies in place for dealing with problems; in fact, more than half apply some form of sanction after they learn about the very first offense.

The College Opportunity and Affordability Act, though it does not mandate implementation of its two "plans," does take the first step down that road. Schools continue to believe they are tackling the problem already, however, without a need for special-interest mandates.