A prominent senator proposed legislation last week that would have required some colleges to buy tools to curtail illegal file sharing. But at the last minute, outrage by college officials forced the senator to back down.
The proposal was made by Sen. Harry M. Reid, a Nevada Democrat and Senate majority leader, as an amendment to the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. (See related article, Page A21.) The amendment called for the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America to provide annual lists of the 25 institutions that received the most notices identifying cases of copyright infringement, usually by students passing around music and movies. Colleges would be ordered to plan a “a technology-based deterrent” and submit those plans for review by the secretary of education.
A major worry was that no software could stop illegal file sharing without interrupting legitimate file sharing as well. “We don’t know of any such software that’s reliable,” said Brian Rust, communications manager in the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s information-technology division. “We would not want to solve the illegal-file-sharing problem by creating a whole other problem that could hinder a student’s ability to learn.”