On November 12, 2008, Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen signed into law Senate Bill 3974 in an effort to curb the illegal downloading of music and movies across the computer networks of colleges and universities in the state. The bill states that “[e]ach public and private institution of higher education in the state that has student residential computer networks shall ... [r]easonably attempt to prevent the infringement of copyrighted works over the institution’s computer and network resources, if such institution receives fifty (50) or more legally valid notices of infringement as prescribed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 within the preceding year.” Championed by the RIAA, who pointed to the University of Tennessee's number 4 position on the list of top music piracy schools, and the MPAA, which noted the school’s number 19 spot on its infringement list, the law will require that Tennessee public and private colleges and universities exercise appropriate means to ensure that computers connected to their campus network are not being abused for the purpose of illegally downloading and distributing copyrighted material through peer-to-peer file-sharing programs.
While the law is certainly a win for the RIAA and MPAA, it might not be so for the Tennessee tax payers. A cost review conducted by the Tennessee Fiscal Review Committee and attached to the bill estimated the cost of implementing the legislation at over $13 million, which includes a one-time cost of $9.515 million to install hardware and software capable of blocking P2P traffic and distinguishing between “illegal P2P options and legal options” and recurring annual costs of more than $1.5 million for personnel and maintenance.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital civil liberties group that opposes the bill, has stated that “[i]t makes no sense to force universities to spend millions on technologies that will hobble innovation on campus while failing to stop file-sharing.” The group believes that the millions of dollars necessary to implement the law would be better spent by compensating creators and copyright owners in voluntary collective licensing agreements, thereby making file-sharing legal.
While it is admirable that Tennessee would take such a large step in trying to eliminate illegal file-sharing across its college campuses, the price tag, combined with the marginal effect the law might actually have given the numerous ways to circumvent the technology, leave much to be desired.
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