shouting loudly

As commentator Roy Mark argues, Congress is totally clueless in its attempts to deal with internet-based infringement.

Mark notes the quixotically conceived attempts to bribe and/or threaten colleges into magically preventing all on-campus infringement. Representatives such as Howard Berman (D-CA) are foolishly listening to copyright industry lobbyists as they blame colleges for continued infringement, but (here’s the argument Mark misses) Harvard is no more liable for their students’ downloads than Verizon is for those of their customers.

Despite this obvious parallel, there is a stark contrast between congressional treatment of colleges-as-ISPs and the red carpet treatment offered to commercial ISPs. Title II of the DMCA was specifically designed with ISPs in mind, so when colleges provide students with T1 connections, I read the law as giving the schools immunity. ISP immunity was the deal the entertainment industry made to get Title I of the DMCA (which regulates DRM), but DRM hasn’t substantially reduced infringement and now they’re trying to renegotiate.

These congressional threats are undoubtedly fueled, in part, by the staggering gap in lobbying power between colleges (connected but always negotiating from a position of weakness) and big ISPs and entertainment companies (practically running the place). Magnifying this gap is a huge difference in priorities. Railing against P2P is Hollywood’s top goal, while avoiding copyright liability is approximately Priority #47 for schools–most of which are beholden to and most crave federal education dollars.

The good news, however, is that schools might get buckets of federal money to install filtering systems that don’t work consistently, mistakenly block legitimate content, and are subject to other headaches and obvious critiques. Oh, and they’re powerless to deal with “the majority of students [who] connect to the Internet using non-school computers and Internet service providers.”

I’m so overcome by patriotic feelings, I just might cry.