One Texas Congressman thinks a little cooling in the clink might be just the thing to get college students and others to knock it off with peer-to-peer online file swapping of copyrighted materials, while one university president says about the last thing we need is one more way to turn students into felons.
Rep. John Carter (R-Texas) told a recent House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property hearing that jailing P2Ping students would help stop piracy. "What these kids don't realize is that every time they pull up music and movies and make a copy, they are committing a felony under the United States code," Carter said in an interview with Wired. "If you were to prosecute someone and give them three years, I think this would act as a deterrent."
That's if you don't mind throwing kids in the calaboose, said Pennsylvania State University president Graham Spanier. ""We'd have to build a lot of new prisons to hold the lawbreakers engaged in piracy of copyrighted materials," he told Wired.
Carter's message for the kids, essentially: gimme gimme shock treatment. "Sometimes it takes the shock value of someone actually being punished," he told Wired. "In this particular instance it might also send a message to these kids that are operating on these networks that, 'Hey, I better stop'… I think you would have a 50 percent falloff, at least, of these people (who are pirating files). I'm not out to get the kids, I'm out to get their attention."
Not so fast on the simplicity trigger, warned American Council on Education counsel Sheldon Steinbach. "Although one would like to have a simple solution to the problem of misuse of university bandwidth, the congressman's proposed solution does not go to the core elements of the issue," he said. "There is no simple answer."
As if there ever is…
