House Passes Bill That Would Require Colleges To Practice Network Filtering

Last week the House voted 354-58 to approve a college funding bill that requires colleges to “make plans to offer some form of legal alternative to P2P file-swapping” and to implement some form of network filtering. Luckily for sane people everywhere, the White House has already made veto-noises at the bill for other reasons—but still, the MPAA came that much closer to forcing its admittedly false worldview on universities.

One distinctive tool in this situation is Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), who introduced an amendment that would explicitly deny funding to schools who didn’t comply, but then had his staffers pull the amendment at the last minute with the excuse that he wasn’t there in person to introduce it. We’ll apparently have to look forward to Rep. Cohen’s industry-friendly amendment at a later date.

“Controversial college funding bill passed–P2P proviso intact” [ArsTechnica]
(Photo: Getty)

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