The U.S. House Of Representatives is taking an aggressive stance on peer-to-peer copyright piracy on college and university networks by crafting a piece of legislation calling for schools to lose federal funding if they do not take steps to thwart piracy on campus networks.

The "College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007" also urges colleges and universities to sign up for music subscription services like Rhapsody or Ruckus with the idea being that students won't pirate via P2P if provided with a legal alternative.

Introduced by representatives George Miller, D - Calif., and Ruben Hinojosa, D - Texas, the legislation states that if schools do not agree to test technological deterrents for preventing piracy, those institutes would lose federal aid. Collectively, such aid totals approximately $100 billion per year according to cnet.com.

With the bill wording calling for all federal funding to be rescinded from a school that doesn't actively guard its networks against P2P-related copyright infringing activity, students who don't even own computers could suddenly find themselves without the funds needed to continue their educations.

"Such an extraordinarily inappropriate and punitive outcome would result in all students on that campus losing their federal financial aid - including Pell grants and student loans that are essential to their ability to attend college, advance their education, and acquire the skills necessary to compete in the 21st-century economy," stated a letter to Congress signed by the chancellor of the University of Maryland system, the president of Stanford University, the president of Penn State and the general counsel for Yale University. "Lower-income students, those most in need of federal financial aid, would be harmed most under the entertainment industry's proposal."

But while university officials expressed their concerns with the proposed legislation, the Motion Picture Association of America applauded lawmakers' attempts to curtail P2P piracy by cutting off school funding. "The MPAA commends Chairman Miller for taking this step to protect intellectual property on college campuses," said the organization's chairman and CEO Dan Glickman. "Intellectual property theft is a worldwide problem that hurts our economy and costs more than 140,000 American jobs every year. We are pleased to see that Congress is taking this step to help keep our economy strong by protecting copyrighted material on college campuses."