Thanks Roger, On 03/12/2013 06:12 PM, Roger Dingledine wrote:
Hi Wendy,
I was in a meeting today wherein Tom Ristenpart explained to the University of Wisconsin network people why he needed to run an exit relay to support his research.
One of the concerns they raised was whether a Tor exit would endanger their agreements with the copyright mafia, per the new 2008 law where universities agree to enforce the copyright mafia's goals in exchange for federal funding.
Yes, the HEOA (Higher Education Opportunity Act). I've been concerned for some time that the law indirectly reshapes Internet architecture to be more friendly to copyright enforcement than communications. I don't believe it requires higher education institutions to block research, but many of them have interpreted it that way because it's easier.
Do you know any details here? My guess is it's another case of "they say you have to have a policy, but they don't say the policy has to do anything". That said, I noticed the word 'effectively' in it.
The law's "effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material," doesn't mean "completely prevent, at the cost of a great deal of non-infringing activity." I'll reach out to Educause, who have done some work on HEOA policies.
I'm cc'ing some existing exit relay operators in case they've encountered this issue (or if they haven't but I have just worried them ;)
For my research and ongoing conversations in Washington, I'm very interested to know about others who have heard this justification for network-restriction. --Wendy
--Roger
----- Forwarded message from Thomas Ristenpart <rist@cs.wisc.edu> -----
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:07:05 -0500 From: Thomas Ristenpart <rist@cs.wisc.edu> To: Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu> Subject: Higher education act
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EPO0938.pdf
----- End forwarded message -----
-- Wendy Seltzer -- wendy@seltzer.org +1 617.863.0613 Policy Counsel, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Visiting Fellow, Yale Law School Information Society Project http://wendy.seltzer.org/ https://www.chillingeffects.org/ https://www.torproject.org/ http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/