Copyright wrongs

Colleges shouldn't have to police illegal downloading

Published October 8, 2007 at midnight

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Congress is in the process of renewing the Higher Education Act of 1965, the federal law that established a major role for Washington in providing aid to low- and middle-income college students.

As with most legislation that has large sums of taxpayer funding attached, lawmakers are finding the temptation to lard it up with regulations impossible to resist.

Beltway-based micromanagement of colleges and universities is rarely wise, but it's really offensive when the hammer of federal law is wielded at the behest of a narrow interest group.

In this case, the powerful interest is the entertainment industry, which wants to sic U.S. Department of Education officials on schools where students use campus Internet networks to illegally download music and video files.

It's odd that Congress would entangle the Education Department in an otherwise unrelated law-enforcement issue; that's usually the bailiwick of the Justice Department.

That said, if this provision of the bill became law, it would lay the groundwork for sanctions against campuses that could result in thousands of innocent students losing financial aid and other support they're entitled to receive.

And the fact that House Republicans are behind this latest ploy to police college campuses merely reinforces the idea that the national GOP has lost interest in the principles of federalism and dispersed power that motivated the party faithful not so long ago.

The measure, buried deep in the bowels of HR 3476, would force the secretary of Education each year to tally up all the reported copyright violations involving students using campus online networks (but not students who use private Internet infrastructure, such as high-speed cable or DSL).

The department would then publish a list of the 25 schools with the most "violations." Each institution would have to demonstrate to Washington that it had taken additional steps to notify students that it's wrong to download copyright material without paying for it and implement "a technology-based deterrent to prevent the illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property."

In other words, schools that made the list would have to install a form of screening or firewall software that the recording industry - er, the Education Department - finds sufficient to block illegal file-sharing, with no regard to how much such a technological fix might cost.

Look, we think people who steal copyright materials should face the consequences. But this would turn education regulators into the Internet Police, tackling a problem law-enforcement agents should handle.

It gets worse. The respected publication Inside Higher Ed reported this summer that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had considered adding an amendment to the Senate bill that could strip colleges that were on the "25 worst offender" list of the right to offer federal student aid. Reid wound up pulling a watered-down version of that amendment after he got an earful from university administrators.

Industry officials claim that 25 percent of illegal downloading takes place over college and university networks. But the way to tackle the problem is through cooperation among students, colleges, law enforcement agencies and the entertainment industry - not by embarrassing schools or threatening innocent scholars.

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