This story - "Campus Anti-Piracy Fight Reaches Congress" - from Internetnews.com pretty much cinches it for individual file traders on campus.

Expect an initiative in Congress in the near future that threatens to pull sensitive government contracts from colleges and universities that don't crack down hard on file sharing. Or perhaps just a Congressional go-ahead for the FBI to start cracking skulls will be sufficient.

Why? Because we can't have computer systems that house government funded secrets being exposed to security threats. Or as the RIAA chairman and CEO, Hilary Rosen, said in testimony to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property:

"Rampant file sharing of music and video content imposes a heavy toll on all of us. Despite education campaigns about the illegality of file sharing, and despite numerous court decisions clearly holding that copying music, movies and other copyrighted files is against the law, there is an alarming disregard among students for Internet theft...Moreover, students are often unaware of the dangers of these P2P applications: compromising campus network security, making their own hard drives containing their personal data available to others, and opening the campus networks to computer viruses...Campus systems, with their fast connections, find themselves hosting total strangers."

So which would you prefer? Cake or death?

Labels: Congress, fbi, p2p, riaa