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University Sponsored Music Services?
Amy's Robot writes "The president of Penn State University is urging colleges to start their own digital music services. The schools would pay the licensing fees, and pass the charges on to their students. His logic is that paying for the school's service is an incentive not to use an "illegal" service. Supposedly, there will be some pilot programs this fall, but it seems like there are a lot of obstacles to overcome before then."
another example of the forward thinking people at PSU
maybe they can have part of the activity fee go towards getting a discount on kegs of beer too?
Now it's to be jacked up even higher so that other jackasses can trade their cheesy MP3s? Or is this tacked onto dorm fees?
Anyone know what percentage of a university tuition actually goes towards eduction (professor salaries, equpment) these days?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Music licensing fees, or external bandwidth costs?
I'm sure that parents will just love seeing this new fee on what is already far to expensive a bill.
Isnt this what Apple is doing and what Microsoft is considering doing? You sign up for the service and pay a fee to download songs?
kc
is not an incentive to move away from free services unless the pay service has so many more features, better search engine, larger library, etc etc..
And btw, who officially stamped these as illegal? As long as Kazaa has its doors open..
--------
Free your mind.
...because the universities are going to license every single CD that each and every one of their students are interested in, right?
This guy is thinking!
1. Let's cheaply (free!) allow everyone to get a product that they love.
2. Let's completely block access to all sources of this product.
3. Let's sell the product.
4. (Ah, shucks... you know what comes here.)
Davak
Surely the choice will still be pay something or get stuff for free?!
I wonder what students will go for...
I'm not sure this will work... For example, there are plenty of universities who license software for discounted or free student use and yet software piracy is rampant on campuses
From the link: " In addition, pirates need a place to store their 'warez' and often surreptitiously hijack third party servers to use as storage sites. This problem is especially acute at universities. "
Why do I h8 apple?
Um, yea...you could say that. Can someone please give me one good reason why the **AA's would participate in a program like this vs. some kind of commercial offering? I mean, not to sound negative but its pretty clear by now that charity (ie: "student" programs) are not very high on their list of priorities. Hell, they just got done SUING some of their customers.
And besides, wasn't this tried before? *cough* mp3.com *cough*
Will ISP's take up this same model and charge more for bandwith?
What about the students that don't use this service? Are they exempt from the charge?
/sig
Up until now policing illegal music sharing was only a requirement placed upon universities by the RIAA and possibly by available bandwidth.
With the possibility of profit, universities may decide to crack down harder on the illegal music trading for their own purposes.
From the aritcle:
"I think it's a very good step to try to find new ways to provide music legally to college students"
Oh that right, college students never obtain music legally.
And just what we need. Yet another fee (YAF) tacked onto tuition. It's bad enough students have to pay for a lot of the crap they don't use anyway. My univiersity added "free" parking my last year. It was made up for in tuition fees. That way, everyone had to pay $50 for the best parking you never got.
Way to go parkig services. Go Penn State! Make all the students pay for music they won't know they're getting. Where's the freedom of speech in that?
If I had something intelligent to say, I would have said it.
Ok...this doesn't make any sense at all. They want to "pass the charges on to the students" as an incentive to not use the "illegal" methods? Um...isn't that the whole reason people are flocking to the "illegal" methods? So they don't have to pay? When I initially read it, I thought it was a good idea. It could also legitimize the whole online services and show the industry people that it's a viable business model. But schools should suck up the costs. They make enough in tuition and other charges. They can use this as a marketing incentive...
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
A university pot and bong shop to keep students from using the illegal suppliers? Same logic it seems to me. And I heartily approve!
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
So, that means ALL the students would be paying for music, even if they didn't want it.
Need some money? Just go to the ones you have the most power over, and most likely already in overwhelming debt.
The president of Penn State is an idiot. Definitely NOT acting in the best interest of the students.
...
Let me get this straight.
A state funded school is going into the music business.
This is sooo wrong on so many levels.
Dolemite
___________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
'It's a terrible precedent for universities to be essentially paying for the entertainment of its students.''
Last time I heard, it is the students and/or their families who are paying for this via the tuition and related fees, not the other way around. Where is the outrage at universities funneling more and more money into sports teams, choosing childrens games over academics?
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Well, let's say a million. If the colleges and universities pay a licensing fee for each student, say $1000, that's $1 billion! All for doing little more than allowing students to listen to music.
As if it's not bad enough that universities are forcing students to pay micros~1 (for software that was probably preinstalled on their PCs no less) through campus licensing. Now they want to force students to pay tuition money to the RIAA? I think I'm going to be sick.
He's exactly right. The idea of the school licensing music for the students is stupid. Either ban p2p on campus networks altogether or make students who want to use campus computing resources attend a brief IP seminar. Squeeze the plagiarism talk in with that and you're all set. If they abuse campus computing resources after having been educated about what they're doing, revoke their priviliges. We're all adults here and don't need any more of this childish handholding.
This is like charging the students for cigarettes and giving them out in order to curb pot smoking. They are totally different and only related in the sense that one is more attractive than the other.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Do you collect medicare or medicaid?
No? Then you should not pay your taxes.
Do your grandparents go to high school?
No? Then they should not pay their taxes.
Have any friends without cars?
Guess what? Their taxes pay for roads.
It is a microcosm of the real world. That is assuming you are a taxpaying member of society and not just leaching off your parents, which it sure sounds like.
Many colleges also won't have the resources (technical, human, financial, and temporal) to pull this off. It takes a lot of time and effort to negotiate the licenses - more than you'd think. So it'll suck for the students if their college has a poor selection but they have to pay anyway, since it's in tuition.
Also, the idea of charging extra to burn onto CD (read the article) is going to be a big turn off, especially when Apple lets you do it at no extra charge.
Really, the best idea would be for universities to partner with Apple and maybe offer discount rates for Apple Music Store. Like, maybe a student rate that instead of $0.99/song is $10 for 20 songs. Or perhaps offer a 5 day free trial of the Apple Music Store during Orientation week. Or something like that. Out of all the legal music services, Apple is (at the moment) by far the cheapest, and the most permissive when it comes to what you can do with the music (unlimited CD burning). Unless the colleges can offer something of comparable or better quality, no one is going to use it. Given Apple's history of being an educational "partner", I'd say maybe Penn State wants to work something out with Steve Jobs...
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
I never listened to music much at school, and I'd have been irritated to get charged $20 a term for a service I never used.
I thought that university-supplied music was called "radio."
Ok, so Apple have shown that on-line digital music sales can be successful. (Short-term anyway)
Academia is trying to protect their students while still throwing cash at the RIAA.
Is it any wonder they are unwilling to start any service of their own? I mean, they are soaking up cash for fun now, with people wanting to throw *more* at them?
1. Create cash cow.
2. Milk cash cow.
4. Profit!
What is happening here is: 3. Mangage to get other people to milk cow for you. FOR FREE!
\\ Mitch
What about those of us that don't want their stupid music?
The RIAA will only be happy when we are charged for being alive, because obviously, 100% of the people who pirate music are alive.
... I'm glad to see the university can afford to spend its money on licensing music instead of providing a quality education.
Is that enough sarcasm for you? Is music piracy an issue on campus? Absolutely. Will group licensing music solve that problem? Not a chance. Why? One reason is the university has very diverse tastes and it would never be able to appeal to them all.
For example, the university has a concert every year called Moving On. There is almost always flack surrounding it as the university can't appeal to everyone's tastes. I don't think licensed university music will do any better when people who have grown up with Kazaa and Napster are used to clicking away to whatever they want.
Personally I think the university should continue to do what it is doing and continue measures to curb piracy as it wishes. But licensing music will not curb the piracy problem.
That's my $.02.
If the college pays for the cost of the on campus students to download the mp3s, it would work much like how royalities are paid by college radio stations works. Plus, blocking outside downloading like kazaa would force the students to use the college's server. Plus the university can offer better quality mp3s, something that can be tough to do with kazaa.
If the college worked it right, and the students didn't have to pay a huge amount of money, I think most students that were living in the dorms would like this. And if the college is worried about students eating up all the bandwidth on the campus, just make the mp3 servers only available to the dorms, not the rest of the network, that is simple to do. As for administrating the server and all, students could that with faculity oversight to keep the cost down.
I would have rather paid the college that I went to for a service like this rather than paying $125 to Student Government every semester. At least I would have gotten my money's worth of music.
eh, this sucks, I am going back to bed....
Courtesy of The Dry Drunk
Almost all of the music I download is foreign: mostly Japanese and Korean. (Yes, I'm a USian.) I don't want any of the music the RIAA's "artists" have to offer. I never bought domestic CDs, even before the "Napster era."
Now, I find it highly unlikely that these networks would ever be able to get licenses to most foreign artists' works. Thus, I would continue to use WinMX to get my music. The RIAA can't touch me (I'm not infringing on -their- copyrights), the University can't touch me (RIT won't act unless on a specific complaint from a copyright holder), and the foreign labels can't/won't touch me (lotsa reasons for that one).
I don't want to generalize, but college studends tend (TEND!) to have more ecclectic tastes than the foaming masses. I highly doubt that they use p2p primarily to get their "Top 40" fix every night.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
Makes sense if you look a PSU as an ISP... just the cost savings in the reduction of bandwidth purchased and by serving cached MP-3's locally is BIG money.
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
What the hell?
I'd know, I used to go there, and have a brother that does go there. Instead of blocking Napster completely, they argued that there was somehow a legitimate use for it, and kept the port open. They did the same thing with Gnutella, Kazaa, et al after Napster went kaput. Result? Bandwidth for actual work dropped to almost zero, and in tech-major dorms, it was even worse. They don't have the cajones to ban protocols, so they'll just make it legal. God I'm glad I'm not on campus.
If some colleges are able to strike a deal with the music organizations, then it would probably be in the music industry's best interests to make identical programs available to colleges throughout the US.
Even if a school cannot strike a deal with the larger organizations, or simply chooses not to do so, they should still organize a way to make any school-specific media available. Recordings of the marching band, or if a college has its own orchestras, jazz ensembles, theatre performances, etc... Any media that can be shared over the network but is produced at the school itself, with permission of the students and teachers, should be made available. This could also be an excellent way to feature independent artists; the smaller labels could negotiate directly with the colleges. Maybe this could be organized around an artist's tours...new music being made available on the college network prior to an artist's appearance in town or at a university venue...
"Supposedly, there will be some pilot programs this fall, but it seems like there are a lot of obstacles to overcome..."
Such as P2P services X, Y, and Z that don't force our students to pay the piper.
Sorry, folks, but I caved in to my inner troll.
I think that its pretty obvious that this plan isn't going to work unless the university takes measures to curtail music piracy as well as provide a paid-for music service. The most obvious thing that they could do would be to limit bandwidth to the Internet, but that would not stop people from sharing music and would cause a lot of problems besides (such as limiting the students' "legitimate" uses of bandwidth). Students could still pass files back and forth over the local network, or, if worse came to worse, on recordable optical media.
The only way I can see this really working is if they start taking draconian measures, such as hunting down students who pirate music and then apply stringent penalties to them. I think, considering how widespread piracy is among college students, that the university's administration would find it unmanageable.
I did my graduate work at a very large university that was deeply in bed with M$ so any M$ product was something like $5 a disk. Did that keep people from using Mac's and installing Linux? -- no, especially in the CS and natural sciences where computation was taken rather seriously. What's the proability that universities will have licenses for the stuff you want? Wait, I can't judge that -- I think most pop music sucks worse than country sucks worse than techno-crap sucks worse than .....
(Techno-crap has a place, just not in my neighbor's appartment at 2am every night... )
Some colleges even work tuition like a scam.
The Rochester Institute of Technology(which I currently attend), for example, lets practically anyone with the motor skills to fill out an application in. They charge them their $26 000 or so for their first year, and then they fail half of them. You see, RIT happens to have an attrition rate over 50%.
Now, that $26 000 certainly isn't spent on the freshman taking English 101 and "Intro to VB." It's spent on the upperclassmen. The failures end up subsidizing the upperclassmen, and everything's great.
I'm just ranting. Ignore me.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
Would this service just be for students living in the dorms? I go to Penn State and I live off campus (along with at least half the student body, most Penn State students only live in the dorms their first year or two) and I would be pretty mad if I had to pay for something that I couldn't even use.
We just had a 14% tuition hike this year. I bet parents are going to love this.
(And to all thos people saying that a university shouldn't go into business it's already happened. Big time collegiate athletics turned universities into quasi-corporations years ago. Though I agree it's pretty shady and shouldn't be done.)
It's amazing that all of the SlashNerds are coming out on this with guns blazing. "We shouldn't have to pay for other peoples downloading!" "The university is trying to profit!" Yadda, yadda, yadda.
For some reason when I read this I assumed that most people would be glad a university is thinking of ways to help their students "needs" and reduce their overhead as well. Wow was I wrong. While there are a few people that like the idea, it seems as if most are finding one reason or another to complain. If a university is willing to license music from a record company and offer it to the students at a small rate, I think it's a great idea. Sure, they're not going to have every artist or album known to man licensed, but at least it's a starting point to fixing an out of control problem. Maybe people would have a better perspective if they were the one's being singled out by the RIAA and being forced to pay a fine PER SONG.
My sig of choice is Marlboro
So are they gonna just license the top X songs? I, for one, have no interest in the most popular music. I can't stand most popular music. It's uncreative and uninteresting. I do NOT want to pay for access to these crappy songs. So I think it's a pretty bad idea.
if(!cool) exit(-1);
Perhaps setting up a service such as this that is paid by tuition fees spread out upon all students is a way of paying off the RIAA so they won't sue them, or their students. The idea is not so much that the students will use this service, which provides paid-for content, as that what the university pays will, in some fashion, "cover" what the students download without paying for from services that share non-paid-for music.
Its a University - you go there to take in and then build on the intellectual work of others. The "intellectual property" culture is what needs fixing.
Penn State has its paws (ha!) in everything else in the state of Pennsylvania. Might as well start selling music... Just another revenue stream, right? Anyway, for those who are interested in the finer details that were glossed over by the article, here is a transcript of the discussion... (Disclaimer: I have a B.S. and an M.Eng. from Penn State, and I think Spanier is a complete buffoon. But I think he's onto something here.)
And you'd think tuition was already expensive enough!
AC comments get piped to
There are practical obstacles and I can see that
So firstly they have to make it an optional fee not hidden in tuition fees. Secondly, they must find ways to block campus p2p, so one subscriber cannot spill the goods. Perhaps smart routers that block p2p ports, and tcp with such headers etc? of ALL known p2p programs?
In theory I support it anyway.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
''I really don't think they understand or believe that illegal file-sharing is the same thing as going into Tower [Records], grabbing a CD off the rack, and running out the door with it,'' said Scott Hervey, chairman of California Bar's cyberspace law committee.
Um, that's because file-sharing isn't shoplifting.
''We have to somehow fix the culture that thinks it's OK to rip off people's intellectual property rights,'' [UC Berkeley' CIO & Assc. Vice Chancellor Jack]McCredie said.
As opposed to fixing the culture that thinks it's OK to rip off the public domain? Which, ultimately, costs the public, society, and culture more: KaZaa, or obscene copyright terms? Why are we in a place now where even university officials are more willing to attack the integrity of their own students than to criticize the practices of a small cartel of international media conglomerates that withhold creative output from the public domain for longer than most of their students will be alive? What is the bigger problem? Why not address that problem, instead of focusing on what is little more than one of it's side-effects?
--Michael
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality;..."
What if I'm Muslim and not allowed to listen to music at all? Will the University still be able to force me to pay for a service I can't use and find morally corrupting? A cafeteria plan is a must.
Anyone else sick of hearing about music this, music that?
Who honestly cares? I throw out the Entertainment section, and I switch channels when the dumb blond "entertainment" "reporter" comes on to tell us about who wined+dined her the best in the last few weeks(ie, which movies she feels like mentioning). I cringe when the regular reporters start talking about revenue figures of movies or albums, or announce it as mainstream news that some movie/album is due out soon...even worse, when they start promoting upcoming programming smack in the middle of their news program. "Thanks Judy. And in other news, join us Thursday night at 9pm for a special on actor's nosehairs!"
I frankly don't give a crap. Music and movie figures seem to always be clamoring for attention, desperate for it- further, they seem to be the only people really fascinated by their industry. I listen to music occasionally. I go to the movies or rent a movie even less- in both cases, because I have many other things to do and neither is producing material I'm even remotely interested in. Music seems, at least to me, to be a small part of most people's lives, its presence VASTLY overhyped by(surprise) the media.
Please help metamoderate.
Personally I think you can't predict what the selction of such a service would be. Especially if this service is funded simply by a university's budget, you have to assume that the main economic force driving it is simply not to get sued by the 'AAs. In which case everyone can pay for their Shakira and Beatles tracks, but the P2P's will remain the only way to get rarer music online. If students are involved, you might see some of the upper tier indies - like Matador or Barsuk - thrown in, but you have to wonder if the sales these labels would generate on one campus is enough to justify the cost of adding them to the catalog...
Casting my mind back to when I was a student life, I think I only actually puchased 3 cd's throughout my entire 3 years at University! If your too skint to buy something and you can get it for free, which route do you take? On my course we used to use A/W Maya a lot. The Uni, arranged a student discount of £350 UKP for a years license. The catch being you couldn't use it for commercial use, you did get the manuals though. Whereas warez version of Maya were 'freely' available, again you couldn't use it for commercial use, but it was free. I don't know of anybody on our course were went for the official student license. Music was similar, it was freely available on the net, there was no way you could afford many cd's on a student budget. Besides there was more important dilemas: do you spend you last £1 on bread and beans or a pint...
packet shaping. will fix all your problems.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
I'm looking for a college/university, not a music store thankyouverymuch. A nice bonus would be a college whose president doesn't have his head up his ass. Is this guy worried about PSU being liable for damages or is he just trying to pump revenue? (No, I didn't RTFA)
Fuck you bastards!
if this becomes a giant online radio ring, i'd love it! i don't download mp3s as it is since i'm lazy and have radiotakeover. If more of these sites started popping up, i'd be one lazy sun of a gun, and very happy!
I write code.
You give an overly facile answer to a very complicated problem.
I work at the network operations for a state system of higher education. For the record, we aren't affiliated with Penn State, although that's as far as I'm willing to go in this forum.
The situation of recreational bandwidth utilization is a very difficult one, and one which we struggle with on a daily basis. Around half the traffic coming from a given dormatory can be accounted for by file-sharing programs like Kazaa, Limewire, etc. At that level, this traffic can put a signifigant dent in the responsivenes of the network. Joe in one room may be annoyed that his download of a bootleg copy of The Matrix: Reloaded is progressing at a snails pace, but so is Jane in the next room, who is annoyed that even Google is crawling at that speed.
And, unfortunately, the answers aren't all that easy. You can restrict traffic coming from the dorms to a certain rate, but that doesn't really adequately stop illicit use of the computers on the rest of the campus, and inappropriately affects people just doing their research / checking e-mail / whatever. You can try doing rate-shaping of just file-sharking connections - something we've experimented with - but future versions of the software may be encrypted, and largely indistinguishable from any other encrypted traffic. And you don't know what "outrage" is until you try raising the student's fees to pay for the extra bandwidth they're taking up. (Network traffic isn't a liquid, it's a gas: it will expand to fill whatever container you put it in.)
Lastly: at many large universities, sports teams are essentially profit centers - just ask season ticket holders. And why should I be more enraged about paying for kids to play sports than I should about paying for them to download stolen porn videos at high speed?
Hah, and let them find something else to charge me with each month? It's bad enough that I have to pay for phone service when I only use my cell phone, now I'm going to have another charge on my bursar account labeled "University File Sharing Online - REQ'D". Sure, they could roll it into the tuition to hide the fact that the fee's there, but that doesn't hide the fact that it exists. And if I don't like the "convenient" service they provide (much like calling long distance from my room phone)? I suppose ResNet will just give me the finger and tell me to walk.
There's two things that college students are doing with music that piss of the record companies:
1) Download music for free
2) Distribute music to others
So, these kids could then legally fill up gigs and gigs of MP3s until they feel all warm and cuddly inside, but how will this stop them from sharing it with others? All it takes is a few students to have Kazaa running in the background, and piracy still reigns on campus.
It sounds as if the president of the college wants to try and wash his hands clean of all liability, but I doubt that this will stop the RIAA from wanting to tar and feather him.
At Penn State, it probably has something to do with the current administration.
Next stop, firebrands for the library's paper holdings. Sharing published works is like murder and theft.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There is NO reason any school's network should be getting killed by P2P traffic. An Allot (www.allot.com) NetEnforcer could throttle that shit down to the point that it wouldn't be a problem at all. Or block it entirely.
No student needs to do filesharing.
QoS people, QoS. Jesus.
Holy crap, I love Canada! You USAmericans mock Canada's slightly higher taxes, but when it comes to things like education and healthcare, it is quite obviously us Canucks who are laughing both last and loudest.
You give RIT as an example. I've seen the commercials, and it looks to me like a pretty low-rated school (I don't believe it qualifies as a "university"), and you're saying the tuition there is $26,000 USD per year, or about $35,700 Canadian. That's insane.
My alma-mater is Acadia University, in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. It is the most expensive undergraduate university in Canada (although I believe Dalhousie is very close). Students who attend there are issued brand new IBM laptops (not for keeps, but they get them for the full term). Every single dorm room is wired for ethernet. It is a beautiful, historic campus with a wide range of world-renowned programs. Tuition is $6584 CDN ($4788 USD) per year (8 months).
Out of sheer curiousity, I checked out Harvard's rates. Oddly, it is $26,488 USD - almost exactly the value you quoted for RIT. I can only assume that you included all other expenses in your value, while the fee I found for Harvard (as well as the number I quoted for Acadia) are for tuition only.
Oh yeah, and of course there's the health care thing. In Canada, if you get sick, you go to the hospital and they help you. If it's not urgent, you make an appointment to go and see your doctor, and he/she helps you. Nobody asks for your credit card or insurance information. And sure, while our taxes may be 1 or 2 percent higher, we're not shelling out $300/month in health insurance premiums, either.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
I find it strange that these idea come from people who (should) have no direct interest in it. Why would an university help the RIAA make money by comming up with a business plan for them.
Normally, things work the other way arround. Industries that don't evolve their business model overtime dies. They rarely get help from other industrie in finding way to get a profitable business model.
But now we have this guy trying to solve the RIAA problem (piracy) without being asked for help. And on top of that some RIAA spokeperson is skeptical of the plan. There is really weird cause the university cannot be taken liable for what users of their network do (they could only be required to give the user info, but, pending a current court case, that may even not be a requirement) as they can hide behind the safe harbor provision for ISPs.
Maybe it's time for some record label to get out of the RIAA and fund a new organization that will work to find new business model instead of trying to preserve outdated ones.
It's a terrible precedent for universities to be
essentially paying for the entertainment of its students.
What next movies on campus... ohh or football!
What is the world coming to!!!
All artists are a member of one of the two big licensing companies. Either ASCAP or BMI. When radio stations for example license music, they pay X amount of dollars to each of the companies to be able to play any of the artist's music that the company represents. Most artists are a member of both companies so it's not an issue. This enables a radio station to play a song as many times as they want without paying a fee per song or every time it's played.
What would be nice is if a univeristy could make a similar agreement with ASCAP and BMI for mass licensing in order to run a file sharing network online on their LAN. I'm sure they already have some licensing in place if they are running a student radio station, or at least they should.
My sig of choice is Marlboro
to ensure that the music industries right to profit is protected ?!? This type of thing is SOOOO far from the schools stated objective that it blows my mind....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
"I don't share any illegal music, but I have to pay for that. So let me at least get something from that bargain".
I bet illegal media sharing level at universities will quadruple as result.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Heh.. When I first started looking at colleges, Vancouver was one of my first choices. Even with the costs involved in leaving the US, it would have been cheaper.
The only reason I stayed was for the full ride. (Remember kids. Take your PSAT. It may seem like it doesn't matter, but National Merit Scholar Finalists get $$$ ^_^ )
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
I think music subscription type services are a great idea, but only if implemented right. It must be a superior product to current peer to peer networks, addressing their weaknesses.
1. The service must be unlimited; unlimited downloads, unlimited burning, and no DRM of any kind. I should be able to transfer it to any portable mp3 device. A pay per play system is braindiseased. Charge a flat $30 a month and you are getting more money from the consumer than the consumer would ever spend on cd's.
2. Lossless format should be available as well, though making it available on demand would be impractical.
3. I should be able to download this music from other users of the service for better speeds and for the health of the network. Only music made available by the service can be shared across the network, and all downloads from peers are verified by md5 checksums before transfers start.
4. If everything is legal, a very very useful central database could be developed to aid in searching. Track user downloads. Yes that's what I said. Use the data to develop a system like Amazon.com, where the service reccomends other music to me according to what others download and keep in their collection.
5. The selection must be greater than that on the peer to peer networks. Even if the service only made available the music of one major label, if it made ALL of it available, that would still beat the peer to peers.
6. There are users of current peer to peer networks who don't like to share what they've downloaded. Force them to keep downloaded music available to the network for at least a while before they can delete it or transfer it out of their shared folder. This may be unpleasant, but it would create a healthier network.
It's nice to see that M$ has had universities in their crosshairs since 1998. With the increasing quality of free software, there will be less and less M$ crap floating around University networks and that's what's really got them scared. They noticed that Universities with good networks and a grip were using and producing free software. Universities that buy into this music bullshit and restrict their networks so that students can't share their work will hurt their accademic standing. Music is a side show at best, most people at school don't waste much time on it. Penn State's obsession with this makes them look like losers.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Luckily, I graduated from South India, where quality education gets precedence over music/sports/entertainment.
I visited 3 different big university and 2 of them had a 15-25% foreigner rate. And as far as i could tell the other university my countries and in germany has did have a similar rate. And I can guarantee you that due to the system being paid by everybody (oh the hooror of socialism :):) ), we did not have to pay 26 K-$ for an excellent college education. So yes, there are other way. Just becauise you do not want to consider them doesn't mean they do not exist anyway.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
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sounds like a Library of music to me. Why not, Universities provide free access to millions of books and magazines and other types of media that they have licensed for the expressed purpose of loaning them out to paying students. What is so different about this idea?
Of course adequate DRM of some sort would need to be in place to prevent students from sending ripped copies outside the university network. On the other hand this is a much more enforceable situation from the Universities POV...
"We have provided you free access to a large body of music, now if you traffick in illicit trade of OUR licensed media, we feel absolutely comfortable expelling YOU! So don't F*CK with us."
I don't have any problems with student tuition subsidizing the recording industry, college age students are their target market and 90% of the crappy music they spit out is in fact designed and engineered just for college age students, most of whom have no idea what good music is yet. In fact it might be interesting to see what student body governments would do if they had a finite number of artists or albums they had to pick from. And yes I think the students should be able to choose which music they want to be paying for w/ their tuition.
So just to remind you; where would we be if our students had to purchase at full price all of the books, etc. they borrow from their school libraries? Can you imagine the pirating of literature? It already happens with textbooks but it would be much more rampant if students couldn't just go and borrow the books they need for their studies, not to mention for pure enjoyment.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Administrators and the EFF should take note that subsidies for the recording industry will not work for a variety of reasons, here is a short list:
Meanwhile the indie bands get nothing, indie filmmakers get nothing - you and I get nothing for our contributions to the public domain - while Hollywood goes back to doing what it's done the last half of this century: reaping profits and chipping away at our intellectual freedom while marketing to the masses all the worse our society has to offer.
You can download GIGS of free live and some studio music LEGALLY from either of these two sources.
Graham "Spankin It" Spanier - PSU President. That's the guy the RIAA sent a fax alleging that I was running an anonymous FTP server full of MP3s way back in 1997. Their network security office got pissed, and yanked my connection in November, my first semester freshman year! I had to use dialup for the next 9 months, while all my friends were playing quake on the lan =(
Have you ever tried to get anything from all those web warez links. All you can get is a million porn pop-ups. Piracy exists in schools because anywhere a large number of computer savy people are gathered there will be piracy. Engenieering packages cost more then MS office products and are usually only used for a short period. As for CS major software regardless of what you own you need to have what your instructor uses to ensure compatibility. For instance the difference between the MS and Watcom compiler for some advanced C++ classes will make a difference if you program even compiles or not.
*** Disclamer *** /Disclaimer ***
I finished my studies in Industrial Engineering at PSU, worked there for 6 years, and still live and work in the area)
***
I'm almost ashamed to be a Penn State Alumnus. Graham Spanier is most likely the WORST President the university has had in a LONG time. He is hypocritical and so out of touch with the students, the community, and society in general that it defies logic.
***warning*** long post ahead ***warning***
For those that don't know about Penn State, Let me give some background. Penn State is the largest university in Pennsylvania (~45,000 students total). It is located in the geographical center of PA, 3hrs from the closest major city (Pittsburgh,Philadelphia), and at least 90 minutes from the closest minor cities (Johnstown, Harrisburg). There are more cows than people in the 50 mile radius around campus, you cannot get to campus without driving at least 10 miles on 2-lane hiway, and the bar to church ratio here is roughly 30:4. We have the largest single student dorm complex (East Halls)in the nation (2nd largest in the world) and the largest Greek system in the country.
With all that in mind, there is a lot of drinking and partying that occurs here. This year, we were voted the #1 and #3 party school by CNN and Playboy respectively. 40% of students ADMIT to binge drinking 4 or more drinks when they drink (though, I bet that number is actually much higher). In my 9 years in the town (I work locally now), there have been at least 8 riots I can remember (3 serious, 6 not) for things such as "We're #1 in the nation at football!" (x2), "Our basketball team does suck this year!" (x1), "There's art all over our streets!" (x4). We're a fun loving (and sometimes destructive) crowd.
With all that in mind, we do do some things involving alcohol for good causes. The most noted is the "Rathskeller Case Race." In the Case Race, the 'Skeller sells cases of Rolling Rock pony (7oz) bottles to patrons who, as longa s they're drinking, can stay. Soon as they stop, they have to leave and more are let in. All proceeds benefit the American Red Cross. The line will extend out the door, around the block, down to the next block, around the corner, DOWN the third block, and halfway down the side of another block. It is one of the top things on the "100 things a true PSU student does."
This year in his infinite wisdom, Graham decided that it would be better for the students (and alumni and faculty) to binge drink on their own, rather than support a cause. He had the race cancelled. He has also tried to make campus dry (except for home football games, of course. Can't stop the rich alumni from tailgating. that my hit into the donations.) In the ime he was fighting to make campus dry (which he accomplished at his last university) he had a fully stocked liquor cabinet installed in his, and all the other higher-ups, offices.
The student activity fee is another great fiasco of his tenure. Every student is charged a $50 "activity fee" that is supposed to go towards the clubs you join and other campus supported stuff that you go to. The original point of this was to help provide activities other than drinking. The majority of mine when I was in school was used to renevate our Student Uunion Building (the HUB) which most students were fine with, but then they added a multi-million dollar cultural center on (which, if you go up at any random time, has 10 people in it, most of which got lost trying to find their way out of the HUB's east wing). A large portion of this center was paid from donations and the Student Activity Fee. The funds were so mismanaged that even some of the oldest, most populous, and most active clubs on campus were unable to collect their stipends from the campus cause the funds had run out.
Now he wants to charge for using music? The students already pay a rather substantial "computer lab" fee and they're reward? Having on campus bandwidth throttled at 56K in the dorms. Th
Nothing fails quite like prayer.
Radio that takes advantage of government and educational exemptions for public performance royalty payments sounds like a more realistic collective work. You know, the university buys music bassed on advice from music experts and student volunteers who then share that music? Wow, what a concept - music education. Oh yeah, I forgot, most college radio stations have gone to "realistic" formats to get their DJ's ready for the real world of comercial radio playlists. There's no chance of extending the free radio concept to online music services is there? The dean it telling everyone to pay per play. What an industry whore.
80,873 students x $2 fee/student = $161,746
That's enough to buy 8,138 CD a year. Compare this to the current holdings and you see a total industry rape about to happen. Buy the music, make it available and tell Universal, Sony, Time/Warner and all that to screw off.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Medicare and medicaid are effectively government-sponsored pyramid schemes. Most people understand this, and also understand that pyramid schemes only work when more people are paying in than are taking out. Hint: This is part of why people are concerned with social security going bust in 15-40 years. (Okay, I switched topics from medicare/medicaid to social security.)
I was going to comment on the gas taxes, but you beat me to it. That effectively qualifies as a use tax, and should cover even public transport such as buses that use the roads, as they have to cover fuel costs also.
But your last paragraph makes me interject a cynical comment. I find it interesting that "the greatest capitalist nation in the world" has one of the best socialist systems around, if you happen to think socialist systems should benefit a mega-corp instead of people. It's kind of sad.
We also have a well-intentioned but very poorly implemented actual socialist system. Gotta love the things FDR did for us.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
That's what many publishers would like. It makes things like this impossible. You know, where they university purchases things share with their students and the public free of charge so that we can all appreciate and share our common culture? Some universites even used to take advantage of their royalty exemptions to broadcast that collection to the public - wow! Nah, pay per play is so much better, right? Anything else is like high-seas theft and murder.
Don't forget that kiddies, sharing is bad. Do what the good folks at McDisneySoft want and keep providing them content you never get paid for while paying for content you never asked for.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Personally, I have no problem whatsoever with a good football program, and other sports as well. Football in particular is a big moneymaker for the school. Consider a school with a decent football team: they probably have a stadium seating around 75,000 (here at OU, we just built an addition to the stadium that will take us to over 100K, but I digress). Figure an average of twenty bucks a ticket (yes, student tickets are cheaper, but non-student tickets are more expensive, and box seats are absurd). Even a light attendance of 50K (remember, a decent team) is a million bucks a game. A sellout game will rake in between $1.5 and $2 million. That covers the cost of the athletic program.
Now, for the profits...donors. Donors like football. One guy I know (actually, the guy whose airplane I fly, including to away games) donates lots of money to the University. Probably at least a quarter million a year, possibly more. That's one donor, and he's small-time (by comparison). I have personally seen Gulfstream V's (yes, plural) come to town just for the game. These are the kind of people who give a million dollars or more every year...money that goes into the Univeristy's General Fund almost without exception.
So, with the football team paying for itself with ticket sales, those donations, many of which are a result of a good football team (don't believe me? Compare the annual donations to the win record...strong positive correlation), and the football team turns quite a tidy profit for the University. Oh, yes, and don't forget the concessions, and the licensed merchandise, and the free publicity (nationally-televised games are great for getting the word out), and football (and other sports) turn out to be a pretty good investment for the school.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
This is a good idea. Why not apply it to enterprises too? ;-)
It would allow enterprises to save some bandwith by avoiding every employee use streams from the internet. It would allow the music companies to get some control and money back.
I would think the bandwith argument might be enough to make the company pay instead of the employee
Cheers
Dumky
I think it is a great idea for universities to offer digital music services. Yeah it would increase the price of tuition... but I know I can't live without my music. If my school can offer that kind of service at a good cost, why not?
Id support this, poor people who cannot afford music, we will get financial aid and it will pay for it, and rich greedy people who can afford it but who choose not to, will be forced to pay.
This so far is the best idea/solution to the problem yet.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
... maybe it's time they started charging students for clothing, and providing it for 'free'.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Why would a university spend money to start a service for its students when similar services are already easily available to them? It seems as though they're saying, "Our students are stealing music, so we're going to start a service to make everyone pay for music this way, whether they want it or not."
It would be like a university president reacting to incidents of grocery store shoplifting by mandating that every student buy his groceries through the university. It's not reasonable, and it's yet another business that a university has no business being engaged in.
From a legal standpoint, universities might have the responsibility to make a reasonable effort to make sure that their networks aren't being used illegally, but turning to this solution appears to be a step in the wrong direction -- and it adds yet another cost to those who want to attend college. Of course, I feel the same way about athletic fees and activity fees that college students are forced to pay without wanting to.
At my alma mater (which has a pretty good music school), the library has all sorts of recordings. Okay, for the music students, much of it's classical, but a bunch of it isn't. Like checking out books, you're allowed to make copies for scholarly reasons, but not personal reasons. The honor system was, I'm very sure, broken all the time, but it's one idea.
Oh wait... nobody uses that silly physical library anymore...
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein
They dont need this kinda setup.
Tuition is high yes, but id be willing to go along and pay for this considering i pay for alot of other things i dont use in my college fees.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Too many people now think that the university is nothing but a holding tank before they reach the real world, and the only thing that makes the holding tank bearable is having as much entertainment as possible.
If you spent more time at college being entertained then you did getting educated, you shouldn't have gone. College is not for everybody. It shouldn't be an option for hedonistic entertainment freaks.
Apple, understanding that College students are relatively poor, should sign volume deals with Universities to allow students to receive discounts on song and album downloads.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
I've seen loads of morally, legally, and contractually wrong network policies in higher ed over the years. How hard can it possibly be for one of them to go "hey wait a minute... aren't we just an ISP?"
So, he wants listening to music off a CD to be a pay-extra thing, not included in the standard fee? He wants to rent the music, basically. Great idea, I mean, it's working great for Pressplay et al, right?
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
Well, the University is on a right track I think. The best thing to do is to create a situation where the students can listen to the music they like. The best way to keep it legal is to not support the RIAA membership. Instead, TAP YOUR OWN STUDENTS!
Yup, just about every college/university has a band with a following. Somewhere out there, is a group you will like. Trust me, you will! So the P2P network that the schools set up will share the talents of their students with other schools and in the process down the RIAA at the same time!
It's simple, the SGA (Student Government Association) sponsors the web site. They in turn get the students to put their works in to the school's system. The bands obviously still own the music, but it's freely available to the rest of the network (get your name out there sort of thing). The school's bandwidth (let's face it, they are paying for it whether it is used or not) is then used to spread the music to the other participants (sometimes over I2)!
Schools across the country can simply join in by setting up a proper system for storing the music by the students and joining the P2P system. Each OGG (down with MP3) holds a URL to a University sponsored page for the music group so people can learn about the group, find out where they are playing next. Maybe even book the group to play at their school, which is what the SGA does (at least ours did). To find a type of music, just hit the systems search engine, which is tied to the rest of the network.
Are their problems with the idea? Yeah, but I can find problems in a Utopian society too! The point is, the kids get their music, they get it fast, and they get exposure. The University comes out with a win, and thumbs a proverbial nose back at the music Industry for being snobbish and greedy and a total {insert explitive here}.
The truth is usually just an excuse for lack of imagination.
Now I've got to pay for some other jackass downloading N*Sync...and do you know why? Because these university types can't fathom the concept of punishing people for committing illegal acts!
If the music guys realy get hinky you retire a CD after so many plays just like a real CD so the only difference between this and a real lending library is electronic distribution.
If enuff people send in CDs everyone can lisson.
If this becomes a business I want my CUT!
There are 10 type of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Yeah, like students that can get the same music for FREE.
If the recording industry wants collge students to start buying music when they're already in a bad shape financially and it's free on other P2P channels, they should wake up.
Although if the university just added the legit P2P charge to tuition... That's all they need to do.
Pay close attention to which labels your J-pop and Eurobeat bands are signed to. They may not be American, but a lot of them are still prepackaged, mass-marketed, and owned by the same multinational labels that our buying off our rights. I'm sure Sony (the evil **AA corporation, not the cool tech maker) alone owns half of the Japanese top-40!
I don't want an unlimited free download of whatever the PSU feels is music. They can't get my choices in news papers right.
And another thing... Wouldn't students be able to argue that they're friends or at least peers... Doesn't that satisfy the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992?
Oh yeah one more thing... WE ARE PENN STATE!!!!!!!
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This is ridiculous... what about people who don't like to listen to whatever the current trend of music happens to be? Why charge everyone? Heck, students could claim ethnic discrimination or something. :)
I point out that I mostly pirate that music. They still don't get my money, it's just harder for them to litigate against me.
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I remember when I arrived at university and found the IS folk complaining about bandwidth use and porn, I suggested to them that they could save the university a fortune by just giving each student a free subscription to a porn magazine.
For some reason they didn't go for it. But really, it's the logical next step. I'm sure Larry Flynt would go for a bundling deal with MIT. Their symbol is a beaver already, so there's some natural synergy.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak