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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."
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.
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*
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.
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.
...
'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?
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.
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
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!
''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;..."
I went to RIT. A lot of shcools spend more money on upeerclassmen then on the freshman, think about it, the senior year classes SHOULD require more skills/equipment and in the end money then freshman classes. RIT's problem with drop outs has many issues:
1) The accept un-/under-qualified applicants, which they do because they feel this need to fill seat and grow into a larger school. Over the last 10 years they have almost doubled the size.
2) They expect students to realize how crappy they are doing and GET help. If they were to add more "Freshman advisors" and anyone who get's less then a 2.0 GPA in a semister is REQUIRED to talk to one of these people (who makes sure they get the help)
3) It's a hard school, i personal know 2 people who dropped out because they had nervous breakdowns!
Don't bitch about the uperclassman benifiting from the lower classman's tuition, that happens EVERYWHERE. If those 50% that leave freshman year cared about their 26 grand they would have done what they needed to to pass. As you pointed out, all freshman year is English Comp and Lit, Basic Sciences, a few fine arts, total fitness and the activiteis, and maybe 1 class in your major each quarter! If they can't pass that, they would prolly have flunked out almost anywere they went!
Secondary education aside, there is a reason people come from all over the world to study at American universities. I can assure you that it's not because they enjoy paying a lot of money for no real gain.