Dear Representative Christopher Van Hollen, Jr,

I am writing about the bill HR4137. In one section of the bill, it suggests that federal funds for financial aid should be contingent on issues of "digital theft," pulling federal financial aid for all students if the university did not agree to test technology-based deterrents. As a college student, this bill makes me very upset.

I think this is incredibly unfair to all students who are in university or may one day hope to attend a university. On a most basic level, holding hostage financial funding for low- and middle-income families in order to help corporations preserve their bottom line is unethical and unfair. I don't deny that file sharing does lose money for the complaining companies, but to blindly punish certain students, even if they do not own a computer, and certain universities which rely more on federal funding than others, is not the right solution.

Then there is the question of what will satisfy the deterrent qualification. Some universities offered an opt-in music subscription service as an alternative to file-sharing, with moderate success. Articles criticizing this bill suggested forcing people to subscribe. Is this fair again to lower and middle income students? To increase their tuition even small amounts in order to pay off the MIAA and RIAA, when even that subscription fee could make it impossible for them to continue at the university or to pay the rent or eat. As a college student, I find this very upsetting. I have friends who can barely make ends meet month to month. They live off campus and take the bus to class in order to save money, and can end up living off of the good will of friends and low cost foods like ramen noodles by the end of the month.

Another solution is to cut out all possible peer-to-peer networks, for example all torrent files. This is also not a very good solution. There are legitimate reasons to use these files - from simply an easy way to give a big file to a classmate for a project, to downloading large files like linux distributions, which are free to use and share but are too large to share easily in other ways. If we start limiting types of files or certain sites, we limit the free speech and ability to learn. There are also cases where files are being used for fair use in courses, which would be restricted. I can't think of a place where having completely open access to the internet and information could be more important.

I don't download music illegally, I prefer systems like iTunes. I also don't need federal financial aid, because I am fortunate enough to have been born to a family that can afford college and is willing to support me through my education. Neither of these facts make this bill less troubling to me. I know it would fundamentally change the quality of my education, through the access to information I have, the respect and trust for the university I hold, and the people I get to know.

Thank you for taking the time to read this note.

Sincerely
--Amy Goodwin

Free Culture by Larry Lessig

As a brief preface: I hate to say it, but sometimes I feel like this comic. I keep up to date on the issue, following the latest news at sites like slashdot, but I don't feel as strongly as them even though I still feel stronger than the average American.

Lessig discusses the protection of content vs. protection of form of content. This issue, I believe, is one of the most interesting. We discussed in my other class as well this situation with the adobe e-books, with all the restrictions. At one point, they even restricted copies to a single computer - if you buy it at home, but want to read it at work, you have to pay again. This is for works in the public domain - works that are supposed to be free. They also get into their restrictions of what you can copy and how much you can copy, all due to the "form" - their ebook, rather than the content - a work which is in the public domain and can be used in any way anybody wants. It is also of sketchy morality to sell something which should be - and sometimes is - available freely on the net.

Part of the problem, as we have discussed in my other class, is that companies are desperately trying to cling to their old models of the world - ones which do not involve the world wide web. It is understandable - the internet as we know it is an invention of the last decade, whereas book publishers and music companies have had their systems at work for far longer than that. Instead of moving with the times and trying to take advantage of the new market, even if it means losing some control over their products, these industries are sticking with the inertia of their state and trying to force the new technologies to behave like old ones. Some textbook companies will sell textbooks online - with passwords, that expire after a term. It is true that this will keep people from just passing on the file to a friend who takes the class the next or same semester, and will kill the second hand textbook market, but it is a ridiculous and exploitive idea. Demanding that people pay for a book, even if it is not as high a price as the print textbook, for something that you will not be able to use as a resource later, will not be able to resell - which the law allows, and is a good way of recouping some of the money expended each semester - is unreasonable.

Other companies, like overdrive.com, offer ebooks to libraries, which is a great idea, but again they try to shoehorn it into a product that it isn't. They not only restrict how long you are allowed to open the ebook - a perfectly understandable restriction, as you can't keep library books forever either - but they restrict the number of copies that can be taken out at a time. This is a completely arbitrary restriction - there is no reason every person who logs on couldn't be able to take out the same book - but is put together in a very stupid way (IMO) - books are not "returnable," they just expire, so there is no way to free up a book you finished for others to get sooner, like you might return the library book to the shelf. As a result, almost all books are already "taken out" and once a copy is out, there is a mandatory three week wait until it is available to another user.

The Importance of Science Fiction

This came to my mind once in class, but the conversation moved on before I brought it up. We were discussing how


...to finish later.