Over the summer, Congress passed the 900-page Higher Education Act. A bill that huge and with such a vague name has to have an impact on the lives of Georgetown students, and indeed it does. While specific regulations are waiting to be decided by the next presidential administration, Georgetown’s federal liaison Scott Fleming said several parts of the bill will affect Georgetown students.

Course registration

The bill requires professors to announce the books required for their classes before the semester starts. This probably will mean syllabi will be published earlier, perhaps even in time for course registration. You win because you can know better whether a class is what you want, and you have more time to find the best deals on textbooks.

Illegal downloading

Copyright owners like the RIAA and the MPAA have strong lobbies in Congress, so it’s only natural that they could slip some provisions into the bill. Universities are going to be pressured to monitor and report filesharing traffic (although not necessarily names of downloaders).

Fleming said there has been talk about technically disabling the use of some filesharing programs (presumably aimed at BitTorrent). He also said, however, that at the regulatory level universities will fight this provision.

Finally, schools will have to make students aware of legal downloading options like iTunes or Napster. This might come to include schools buying block downloading plans with companies that will cover all student downloads.

Of all the changes in this bill, filesharing will be the most interesting one to watch.

Textbooks

Don’t get down if you feel like big business lobbying won on filesharing–it didn’t on textbooks. Textbook companies will have to publish the differences between editions, so they won’t be able to just make small changes and destroy the used book market. “Bundling” of DVDs, workbooks, and textbooks will become illegal, so you won’t have to pay for a DVD and book when you only need the book.

Professors and Georgetown will also have to make you aware of cheaper options to the bookstore, including used books, online vendors, and public domain works. Why pay $20 for a Marx reader you could put together for free online?

Flickr photo from user vgm8383 used under a Creative Commons license

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 6:39 pm and is filed under Campus News, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.