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

Mac users streaming on campus

[pazu13]

As a college student, I'd like to note that on my campus mac users (and some windows users too, probably) are making use of the miracle of iTunes.

Since the newest version of iTunes lets you share music across the network, a large number of students have simply opened up their lists for perusing and playing. (Downloading, as far as I know, is impossible.)

Because no one is downloading the files, so clearly is just benefitting from sampling the music (that is, some people will almost definitely purchase CDs when they find themselves deprived of permanent access to songs that they like. -Ideally. I realize I am a bit optimistic), I feel that this should be legal, even though I realize that it's probably not. However, I find it amusing that even though iTunes warns you that you should only share music with yourself -presumably when on some other computer on the network with iTunes- it allows multiple users to be logged in at the same time, and doesn't require that you set a password. So the system has essentially set itself up to be abused.

Re:There is no free lunch

[nerotik]

OK, on one hand you've got a point... especially seeing as how this comes on the heels of the largest tuition increase at PSU in over 20 years.

Then again, lets look at the numbers. Napster charges $9.95 a month for unlimited streaming. The deal is only for the 13,000 or so students in the dorms. So that's around $130,000 a month, not including any discounts the University is getting. So for the 8 months of regular sessions we're looking at around $1 million dollars (again not including discounts) to keep the kids streaming. Penn State's operating budget for 2000-2001 was over $2 billion dollars, so that million bucks or so is really only a drop in the bucket. At my school we got "free" buss passes and "free" software all paid for through liscensing agreements negotiated by the unversity, so why not "free" music as well, especially if it helps the university avoid hassles from the RIAA?