College should be about broadening horizons, academic learning, and social development, not about policing file-sharing.

The entertainment industry already has an oh-so-brilliant aggressive campaign to sues its own customers. Now it has convinced Congress to pass a college funding bill with anti-P2P provisions intact under the guise of several higher education benefits with additional provisions:

A statement issued by the joint House and Senate committees responsible for harmonizing the two versions of the bill explains that universities will have to begin authoring formal piracy deterrence plans. The statement also recommends several commercial anti-P2P technologies including Audible Magic’s CopySense Network Appliance and Red Lambda’s Integrity filtering tool. —arstechnica.com

In an info session with a university lawyer, she summed up the requirements of the Higher Education Opportunity Act recently passed by Congress:

1. Education - educating users about illegal file-sharing
2. Technology - having technology in place to combat illegal file-sharing
3. Alternative - providing an alternative to illegal file-sharing

I suppose it’s fortunate that the institution where I work is already doing all three. The first requirement, sure… it makes sense for colleges to educate in general, but requiring them to have technology in place to deter illegal file-sharing and an alternative solution to fight the entertainment industry’s fight is outside the scope of the business of college and some poor (and literally, poorer) colleges will likely be scrounging to meet these requirements. Luckily, Ruckus is free to all college students.

The entertainment industry has not done well in setting an example. The RIAA’s effort on education has big flaws as I mentioned previously, the MPAA has violated copyright law in their enforcement attempts (sounds like the copyright owner had a similar experience as me in having difficulty in contacting them for corrections), and the MPAA has presented grossly inaccurate research results on movie piracy.

Also, there’s been a long standing issue about how the entertainment industry has bullied colleges into allocating their limited resources to do their dirty work yet they are not even significantly contributing to the added cost in personnel, technology, and infrastructure to accomplish this, especially since they are recommending commercial anti-P2P packages.

The mission statements of colleges don’t include any goal even remotely close to playing cop in the file-sharing fight and it shouldn’t. It’s not their place or responsibility. Could the entertainment industry meddle even more into educational institutions and their responsibilities? Unfortunately and sadly, the reality is likely.