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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.
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
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.
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.
...
'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.
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.
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....
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.
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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. ---*
On PSU's board of trustees sits one of the major lawyers for the RIAA. I hope this explains it.
Finkployd
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...
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!
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
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.)
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;..."
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...
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.
You are way off base here. You don't even make sense.
I pay for Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security, because (theoretically) others will pay for me when I need it. Maybe I could blow all my Social Security money on the latest pop CD's (by then they will be singing from the cradle), but I'll be more likely to spend it on saltine crackers.
Another poster mentioned the invalidity of the high school argument.
I don't have many friends without cars. Guess it's because they have jobs, and are able to get out of their immediate vicinity.... Plus you're very illogical on this point too. A large amount of road tax comes from GASOLINE. Unless car-less people are really into mowing their lawn or setting brush fires, aren't buying much gas.
Your last comment is the most illogical. An independent, taxpaying member of society (such as yours truly) is going to be more concerned about forced expenditures. If a kid is leaching off their parent, they wouldn't give a crap about a few extra bucks on the bill. So I'm not in college and it won't affect me, but I don't like the precedent. Eventually they take all of our money away, then decide what we should be allowed to have.
...
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!
No lie:
http://www.psu.edu/trustees/robinson.html
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
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.
Judging by the number of trolls on slashdot claiming to have graduated from american universities, it's not the education either.
Most likely the women!
Posting useless rant since 2003.
*** 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.
Yes, you bring up that most wonderful of all quotes, which I am going to butcher for your amusement...
American universities provide the best education terrorists can get anywhere in the world.
Which is both true and false, of course. It really is amazing how many of the top-level terrorist leaders seem to be educated at Harvard, Yale, Oxford (okay, I admit, that's in England) or other Western schools of similar credentials.
But at the same time, most of the suicide bombers are from financially-depressed areas and can't really think seriously about travelling out of their home country, much less going abroad for an education.
It occurs to me that mentioning this in what is already nothing like a rational discussion could be... unwise.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
... 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
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.
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!
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.
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. :)