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.

Comments

There is no free lunch

[Anonymous Coward]

At least in this case. The students (and taxpayers to a degree) will be paying for it as part of their tuition.

Re:There is no free lunch

[Evil Adrian]

Yeah, the taxpayers also help pay for Nittany Lions football (which not everyone watches), concerts at the stadium (which not everyone attends), etc. etc.

Tax money goes to pay for stuff. That's how it works. Not everyone benefits from every single tax expenditure. GET OVER IT.

Great, more crap to raise tuition....

[Sikmaz]

What about those people who have no interest in downloading music legally or otherwise? Why do they have to have this cost come out of their tuition?

I say leave it up to each individual student.

What if you don't have a 2K/XP box?

[physicsnerd]

Umm, let me get this stright. If you're a student at Penn State part of your fees go to pay for this music service. However, to take advantage of this music service you must own a Windows 2K/XP machine. So if you don't have a 2K or XP box you're paying for other people to listen to music? What about all the students who are still running NT/95/98/Me or Mac/Linux/Solaris/ect? While I'd bet a good 80 to 90% are running 2K or XP what is the school doing about the rest? If I was a student at Penn State I'd be asking for a partial refund of my fees. How do you Penn students feel about your fees going to this?

Sounds good, but ...

[MacEnvy]

What about the students that DON'T use Windows? Believe me, there are plenty of us. Year after year, decision after decision, school administrations on every level create environments more inhospitable to non-MS users. This may be going too far - by using a service that mandates MS, and a service that EVERY college student is going to want to use - the use of Macs and Linux (there are a few of us using Linux, yes) is discouraged. This is unhealthy for both the integrity of networks and free thought itself.

Hopefully someone will come up with a multi-platform interface for the new Napster service. If not, you can bet that I'd be knocking on the door of the CTO, demanding matching funds for iTunes!

Re:Sounds good, but ...

[Evil Adrian]

A better question is: Why should Penn State not do something that benefits 95+% of their student body just because they can't offer it to another 5%?

I have a problem with the story here

[Tim_F]

The poster of the story assumes that a majority of the students at this University run Linux as their desktop operating system. One simply need to look to Slashdot to find out that even among nerds this is not the case. The vast majority of hits that Slashdot gets comes from Microsoft Internet Explorer.

This is a good deal for the students of this University. They will be able to legally get access to quality music in an open format while probably just paying a minute increase in their tuition. Who wouldn't want to do this.

Any of the minority of the students that use Linux should just stick to pirating. The RIAA hardly cares enough about their OS fo choice to waste their money going after them.

Use Wine.

[DraconPern]

It might, except for students that don't run Windows

How's that a problem? Just use Wine.

What is College for?

[tintruder]

While this is convenient for the students, and certinly contributes to the battle against the extra-legal oppression of RIAA / DMCA etc., I still wonder what is going on at the colleges.

Perhaps I'd see access to music as a critical component of college attendance if the college attended were Juilliard.

But in general, public colleges obtain 75%+ of their funding from the taxpayer, not from tuition.

So I'd like to see the students dedicating as much time, effort and money to LEARNING as they do to downloading music.

It is simply a matter of priorities, and the priority at college ought to be education.

And for those who would ridicule the above because you happen to also like music, consider the waste of money because the vast majority of college freshman show up requiring courses so rudimentary they ought to be considered "remedial". Basically, what they spend the first year or two doing, they should have learned in Junior High.

This lack of focus on EDUCATION, which is really what college is for, costs everybody money whether you are a student or not.

As a Penn State Student

[IAmATuringMachine!]

As a Penn State Student and a Mac geek, I did my part to write in complaints to the administration and the school paper about how this isolates people using other platforms. Well, other platform anyway - iTunes is certainly the lesser of the evils - but I fear Linux simply won't be supported by any major online music store [that uses DRM].

It's funny that just yesterday our paper ran a feature on how much students here like iTunes and then today say "Napster!" Similarly, last week they had a feature on how a lot of the labs are going to Mac OS X.

Hopefully my writein as a "computer science graduate student" will perk up some ears...

RIAA Board Member On PSU Board

[acaben]

Here's why a useless, crappy, DRM'd version of these songs is being offered to Penn State instead of an AAC and the usage rights that Apple's iTunes offers.

There's a member of the RIAA's board on Penn State's Board of Trustees.

That's the reason this is going on. They're charing all kinds of fees to a bunch of students who can't even USE the service on their Macs, and providing shitty DRM'd technology to those who have PCs just so a member of their board can buy another yacht. I think it's rather dispicable.

Free is no longer what I am after

[jbs0902]

It might stop some downloaders, but at this point it has become political for me.

I want to bankrupt the bastards. They had every opportunity to replace their outdated failing business model with a new successful model. Now after 5+ years, Draconian laws, and plenty of lawsuits, life is a bit worse and Apple brought them kicking and screaming into a successful form of on-line business.

Let them fail.
Let a more successful business rise in their place.

It is not called piracy
It is called capitalism.

There is a transfer of lunches

[lpret]

You have no idea about college networks do you? Recent statistics (at the bottom) have shown that nearly 80% of a typical campus network traffic is filesharing. If that can be curbed, then the network will become more stable and be able to handle traffic better. This also means less resources needed which translates directly into money.

So the money saved by reducing network traffic is probably more than the 130,000 that this deal requires of the school. Furthermore, I'm sure Napster charged them less than that because it opens the door to other schools. So, the school is banking on less money spent on IT, better protection against the RIAA, and gets great publicity as a "technologically advanced" school. It's more like Penn State is saving money by giving it's students a free lunch.