Tennessee sure has their priorities in order. The state just signed legislation that mandates that the 222,000 student public university system spend $9.5 million for file sharing monitoring software, monitoring hardware and 21 addition staff positions for monitoring the network traffic of students.

As big of a waste of money as this is to begin with, it’s even worse when you see that Tennessee is increasing tuition and firing teachers in order to combat a $43.7M deficit. And I’m not even sure what they’re getting out of this. The RIAA gets to lose slightly less money I suppose, and Tennessee gets…? Maybe they’re getting paid to do this by the RIAA, who has this to say about the whole thing:

"This bill, the first of its kind in the nation, addressed the issue of campus music theft in a state where the impact is felt more harshly than most," said Mitch Bainwol, the RIAA's chairman and CEO.

And the governor echoes that thought almost verbatim:

Bredesen, governor of the nation's country music capital, said "The illegal downloading of music has a profoundly negative effect on the music industry. As home to so many record companies, music publishers, writers and artists, I am proud that Tennessee is taking action to prevent it."

Yeah, yeah piracy is an evil scourge that must be wiped off the planet, but you know what else we need? Kids going to college being taught by professors. My ex-girlfriend was bullied into paying a $5,000 settlement to the RIAA after the University of Michigan reported that she had downloaded four songs on Limewire. She was there on financial aid and she almost had to drop out of school because of it. What good is this doing for anyone besides the already rich music executives and musicians? It’s absolutely disgusting.