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A Ban On Napster Becomes A Ban On Education?
Ecliptik asks: "I am currently a buisness student at the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio. Many of my classmates and I are writing a large paper for a law class we have on Napster's legal battle. Due to the current ban which our university has put on Napster, many resources on Napster's site are blocked. So what do you think? Is this not only a ban on music, or is it also a ban on educational resources as well?" I can see why you'd want to ban the Napster client, which uses resources other than the standard HTTP port, but why do some colleges block access to Napster's Web site as well?
or have they banned search engines too?
Baz
My computer connects to the internet, wich has illegal things on it. Should I disconnect my computer from the internet...Signed, Perplexed
Dear Perplexed: No, you should destroy your computer, lest you might later succumb to the urge to reconnect it to the internet, where as all upright persons are appalled to know, licentious talk of illegalities freely and shamelessly circulates. While you're at it, you also, just in case, should pluck your eyeballs out, as per Matthew 5:29.
Yours Dr. Laura - WKiernan@concentric.net
It's not just about legal issues. My campus is heavily debating a ban - our sysadmins for the most part hate censoring anything, but our single T1 line simply cannot handle it (we're talking about transfer speeds sustaining 50 - 90 KB/s prior to Napster's release, and not even being able to sustain 1 KB/s after people started using it en masse).
In the past, there was a loosely enforced policy in effect where students could only run Napster in the off-peak hours of 1 - 5 AM so as not to interfere with legitimate academic usage. Now the school has budgeted for a second T1 line, which has been completely dedicated to academic machines (faculty, labs), leaving the other for students to fight over themselves. Needless to say, accessing anything from your dorm room here still runs at about 50 - 500 bytes/sec - aka 0.5 KB/s max. I couldn't care less about people downloading songs and what not, but when it takes minutes on end of waiting to load simple web-pages something needs to be done. It's not denying people of an education to block the Napster website, it's ignorant Napster users who spout "Why do my songs take so long to download on Napster?" while 150 people are simultaneously downloading from their machine that deny us of an education...
I agree that censorship is not in any way an American ideal, and it's anyone's choice to break the law and pirate copyrighted music, but I fail to see what other choice is available when Napster users are robbing others (like myself) of their tuition money that goes towards school-provided Internet access.
I'm open to any suggestions anyone might have as a step to resolve such issues, or any advice on alerting the campus of the obviously rampant problem and steps that can be taken to resolve it... Feel free to drop me a line at cmgroteATthethirdDOTnet. Hopefully there will be enough bandwidth for your message to go through =)
"Try that in Windows!"