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