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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
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*
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.
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
... 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.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
On PSU's board of trustees sits one of the major lawyers for the RIAA. I hope this explains it.
Finkployd
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
''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.
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.
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.