New bill would punish colleges, students who dont become copyright cops
Ars posts a good summary of the bill I mentioned the other day.
What has been bothering me about this one is the question: why colleges? The only reasonable answer I can come up with is that they are service providers to a discrete population of younger savvier users who (one might think) would be more likely to infringe.
Yet, is this any basis for legislating against them? Armed robberies (I am guessing) might be carried out to a higher degree by lower income folks, but we do not pass gun control laws that specifically target this population. We know that there are probably a host of other factors that go into this correlation (things like financial need, desperation, and mental illness).
It seems to me that some of the factors at play here, other than being “at college,” is that the population is younger, more likely to have a computer, and is more likely to have an interest in many types of media. Under these same factors, we might require a dot-com company that provides internet access to follow the same rules outlined in this bill.