Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

Congress recently passed Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) which is expected to be signed into a law by the president soon. This act requires several regulatory and reporting requirements for institutions like us when the law goes into effect. The specific piece of the legislation that is relevant to us has to do with uploading and downloading copyrighted materials through peer to peer file sharing. Thanks to some vague language that has been adopted, at this stage, the requirements (to be discussed below) are up to interpretation and over the course of the next year, Department of Education will help finalize the specifics. EDUCAUSE, in collaboration with American Council on Education and the Association of American Universities prepared a memo to EDUCAUSE members explaining what the law means to us.

The memo from Educause, which can be found at: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/epo0815.pdf summarizes the three items that we should know about under What the law would require. Essentially:

1. We need to inform the students annually that illegal filesharing is punishable by law.
2. We should certify to the Secretary of Education that we have developed plans to “effectively combat” illegal file sharing. The language used in the law stipulates that implementation of technologies such as bandwidth shaping and network usage metering will qualify as “effectively combating” the issue at hand.
3. “To the extent practicable” the institutions will be required to provide alternatives to illegal file sharing. Thankfully, the law is pretty vague about exactly what this means…

The good news is that we are already doing most of what is required. The bad news is that we have to wait for a year to see how specific the DOE want to get in interpreting the law. I will explain some of these in the discussion below.

1. We already have a popup in place which explains the copyright issues and illegality of sharing copyrighted material. This is shown when a student enters the electronic portfolio for the first time and without agreeing to this, the student cannot enter the portfolio. The law requires that we do this annually. We do this only once for every student during their 4 years, however, the technology we have for this does not prevent us from doing it annually. We are waiting for the Dean’s Office and Registrar’s Office to tell us the most appropriate date in the year to do this.
2. We already have bandwidth shaping rulesets in Packeteer which manages the illegal file sharing to the best of our abilities. Like viruses, spams and worms, this approach is reactive. A new software that bypasses existing rules will come up and we wait for Packeteer to find the solution and push it to the appliance. Unfortunately, this is the best we can do at this point.
3. We offer Ruckus service to the students. It is not clear how many take advantage of it, but we are fulfilling our obligations.

What really worries me are the following:

1. Would the interpretation of the “effectively combating” be expanded to require the institutions to place technological controls internally within the campus network? I hope not, because this will be counterproductive on a lot of counts and will be extremely expensive.
2. Many discussions about the interpretation of the copyrighted content seems to revolve around “illegal file sharing”. Technology is increasingly making it easy to share copyrighted content that is not file based – streaming videos and TV shows (SOPCast,Media Portal etc.). Would these be covered by the same law? For example, with < $100 investment, one can hookup their computer to the TV and broadcast the content to others on the net. The ones viewing it can either watch a stream of it. Where do these figure in the current legislation?

My position on this: Whereas we should do what is required by law in educating our students on illegal file sharing, I strongly feel that the content distributors must also be held responsible for not investing enough resources in researching technologies to protect the content in the first place, so it becomes harder to share illegally.