sworona's blog

Today, October 29, the Department of Education issued the final regulations related to Peer-to-Peer File Sharing on campus networks, which are unchanged from the proposed regulations posted August 21. The three primary requirements are thus now finalized:

Last Friday, August 21, the Department of Education issued its long-awaited Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) related to Peer-to-Peer File Sharing on campus networks. The proposed regulations reflect the agreement reached by representatives of higher education and the entertainment industry during Negotiated Rulemaking sessions held earlier this year.

The proposed regulations create three primary requirements:

The Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) signed into law by President Bush on August 14, 2008 includes language related to verifying the identity of students in distance-education programs. In particular, the law says that accrediting agencies must require institutions offering distance education to "have processes through which the institution establishes that the student who registers in a distance education or correspondence education course or program is the same student who participates in and completes the program and receives the academic credit".

ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which has been under negotiation between the U.S. and a couple dozen other industrialized nations since 2007. Counterfeiting is bad, so anti-counterfeiting must be good, right? Well...

Everyone's buzzing about a headline in Monday's Wired Campus blog from the Chronicle of Higher Education: "New Study Shows Decrease in Illegal Music Downloading". The survey of 1,000 music fans was carried out by a pair of British research organizations and initially described in The Guardian on Sunday. The Guardian headline: "Collapse in illegal sharing and boom in streaming brings music to executives' ears".

Last August, President Bush signed into law the 1,200-page Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) of 2008, termed by one Senator "a well-intentioned contraption of unnecessary rules and regulations that waste time and money that ought to be spent on students and improving quality." (For the source of that quote and additional HEOA background and references, see On Making Sausage in EDUCAUSE Review.)

Several sections of the HEOA deal with unauthorized file-sharing on campus networks, imposing 3 general requirements on all U.S. colleges and universities:

On April 29, 2008, the Governor of Tennessee signed the country's first law requiring campus networks to solve the problem of digital copyright infringement. High on their success in the Volunteer State, entertainment industry lobbyists moved on to Texas. If you can fool them in Nashville, why not Austin?

The stage was certainly set for a repeat performance. The Texas House of Representatives had already asked its Business and Industry Committee to research the issue and suggest legislation: