Making Higher Education Less Affordable

In the past few months Federal and State legislators are hell bent on passing new special interest legislation that will brutally and expensively add to college student's higher education costs. This of course trickles down to pinching the wallets of mom and dad.

This new sugar-coated tax involves government passing along the cost of enforcing and policing illegal file sharing activities to Universities and Colleges or their federal grants and funding are put in danger. The fact that these legislative extortion scheme presume guilt of students and faculty before innocence is of no consequence to the political whores who promote such legislation for special interests.

The latest example of such political debauchery is playing out in Tennessee. Arstechnica reports;

Efforts taken by universities thus far to deter and prevent piracy have had mixed results. The University of Utah, for instance, claims that it has reduced MPAA and RIAA complaints by 90 percent and saved $1.2 million in bandwidth costs by instituting anti-piracy filtering mechanisms. However, the school revealed that their filtering system hasn't been able to stop encrypted P2P traffic and noted that students will find ways to circumvent any system. The end result, some say, will be a costly arms race as students perpetually work to circumvent anti-piracy systems put in place by universities.

The content industry fully admits that its own anti-piracy enforcement efforts have been extremely costly. These laws look like an attempt to shift some of those expenses away from the content industry and onto students and tax payers. Surely, university resources are better spent on education than on futile efforts to prevent file sharing and prop up outdated business models. Unfortunately, lawmakers don't seem to agree.