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Penn State Students to Get Free Music From Napster
Mr. Show writes "Napster and Penn State have unveiled a deal to give faculty and students free access to music beginning next spring. The deal would give students only limited access to downloads, so presumably most of the free music will come through the streaming service that would otherwise cost a monthly fee. Will this help curb piracy on college campuses?" It might, except for students that don't run Windows.
For those who read a little more closely, the service is not being offered for free. The cost of the monthly subscription is covered by the $160 service fee that on-campus students are required to pay if they want to hook up to the network.
Presumably, Napster offered a steep discount on the $9.95 monthly fee, but I'm sure it's not free.
Just a quick note... My dad is the one who's working on the live.psu.edu site. It's running on apache and php on MacOS X Server. The server's getting hammered today, he says, but the machine's holding up quite well. It's a shame that open source and Mac technologies can be used to promote this new Napster program at PSU, and yet students with machines running similar OS's will be wasting their fees paying for a service they can't use. It's a shame PSU couldn't figure out way to work with the cross-platform iTunes Music store.
" Yeah, the taxpayers also help pay for Nittany Lions football (which not everyone watches), concerts at the stadium (which not everyone attends), etc. etc.
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No tax payer money goes to fund the football team. In fact in the 6-7 home games each year the profits from ticket sales and so forth pay for all PSU athletics and then some. The university makes money off the football program. No state money is used. In fact you pay less in state taxes because of the football team.
Also there are no concerts at Beaver Stadium, concerts are at the Bryce Jordan Center, which once again makes money for the school.
And, I guess he's not a member of the board, but Senior Counsel. I guess that means he's responsible for suing grandparents and little girls.
the network will become more stable and be able to handle traffic better. This also means less resources needed which translates directly into money.
This is one of the silliest things I have heard all day. As a college student, I assure you that most campus networks (the one here and the ones my CS friends at other schools talk about) are set up to handle much more traffic than they currently get. My school, for example is running 2 T3 lines, so a little filesharing is not particularly taxing on the system. Also, since it's on all the time, no one saves any money if we simply don't use it. Finally, you have got to be kidding yourself if you think that using less bandwidth (even if it did save you money) would save more than $130,000 per month. That is a lot of money - as was mentioned in a previous post, that is about $1million per year. There is no way that any school could save that much from decreased bandwidth (actually, I expect that this deal will increase bandwidth, because now the students against illegal file sharing will start downloading music too).
This is obviously just a way to get the RIAA to back off and stop bullying them. I for one cannot think of another reason why this could be reasonable or economical.
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