Comment Outraged for many reasons:big 1 collateral damage (Score 1) 288
This is so completely outrageous because if you read the law they basically force the schools into taking technological steps that have significant/and or insurmountable costs and/or incalculable collateral damage.
The schools must impliment one of the folling technological solutions to inhibit piracy and it MUST work or they have to try another (with reviews).
There are four categories of "technology-based deterrents" they can choose from:
1. Bandwidth shaping
2. Traffic monitoring to identify the largest bandwidth users
3. A vigorous program of accepting and responding to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices
4. A variety of commercial products designed to reduce or block illegal file sharing
Bandwidth shaping? This means that I'm screwed if I want to download an Ubuntu ISO. Traffic monitoring? I'm screwed if I want to download lots of GNU/Linux ISOs- not to mention my privacy. Respond to DMCA notices wouldn't be acceptable because of the insurmountable costs to forward notices to students unless you correctly interpret the law-at least my interpretation of it. That being if the school hosts the content on there servers they must act. If a student hosts it on their private servers the DMCA doesn't apply and they must bring a lawsuit. The university should still be protected under the DMCA since they still made a good faith effort to comply with correctly filed DMCA complaints. Lastly we all know that commercial products that are designed to reduce or block 'illegal file sharing' have both collateral damage on fair use rights and content that isn't held by the copyright owner in question claiming copyright whose copyright is being refused- not to mention degrading performance of the network. Interfering with network traffic should be illegal. It doesn't matter who does it. Neither ISP nor government should should interfere with a users traffic. We should all have unfiltered access to the internet without any firewalls and if the technology is shared bandwidth evenly distributed amongst users to whatever alotment they've purchased or otherwise obtained until it is utilized at which point they can be charged for more or be throttled. Of course bandwidth prices should never be costly- and the more you purchase in a given month the less it should cost as you are contributing more to the maintenance of the system- and therefore entitled to lower prices as is the case with ANY OTHER PRODUCT- when purchased in quantity (just about).