Washington - The U.S. House on Thursday approved an education bill that includes provisions stating that universities which receive federal funding need to come up with technological deterrents to campus file-sharing, and look towards offering legal alternatives, CNET News.com reported. The provisions are part of the College Opportunity and Affordability Act, and were applauded by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), while being derided by university groups like Educase and the Association of American Universities.

There has been much confusion over whether the bill as written requires that universities follow through on the deterrents and legal alternatives, or risk losing funding.

The Senate has already passed a different version of the bill, and the two legislative bodies will have to reconcile the differences between them before a final version is signed into law.

Recently, the MPAA called attention to an error in a key study it had been using to push its viewpoint on campus file-sharing. The study initially attributed 40% of the movie industry's domestic losses from illegal downloading to college students, but was revised downward to 15% due to a "human error."

"Now that the data produced by the MPAA, the lead advocate for this provision, shows that illegal file-sharing by students using university servers is a very small part of the larger file-sharing issue, this provision is the moral equivalent of using a bazooka to kill a fly," Barry Toiv, a spokesman for the Association of American Universities, told News.com.

Related Links:
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9867146-7.html

http://snipurl.com/1zaeh (DMW previous coverage)

http://snipurl.com/1zad6 (PDF: text of bill)