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?
Ahhh I can smell the stream rippers now. Smells like Napster Marshmellows all over again :)
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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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.
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.
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.
It wasn't me, it was the one-armed
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.
WINE MOTHERFUCKER DO YOU SPEAK IT
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides By the inequities of Microsoft Windows and the tyranny of Bill Gates. Blessed is he who, in the name of open source and good will, Shepherds the newbie through the screens of blue, For he is trulely a computer scientist, and the finder of lost productivity. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger Those who spread virii and worms throughout my networks. And you will know my name is the Guru when I lay my code upon thee."
----
Squirrel
Both are information. But I guess only some information is free. What is the point of a key by the way? To lock up content? Doesn't it want to be free? I don't know why you wouldn't tell me then. What's your home address?
The safest way to approach lava is to have another person with you and he goes first.
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...
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
-E. W. Dijkstra
What about people like me who listen to international bands? We're left out in the dark, and therefore we still must illegally download music to get our fix one way or another. And to make it worse, I'm a Mac user, so WINE won't even run on PowerPC architecture. Honestly, I don't think Napster nor Penn State even took into consideration the people who don't run Windows, since most kids honestly get sucked up at the local Best Buy "$600 Steal--perfect for college student" "deals" that include XP.
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.
Penn State Strikes Deals with Napster, Budweiser
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.
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.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
I submitted this earlier today, but was rejected. So here's what I had to say. It contains a bit more information.
After the University of Rochester announced last week in its school newspaper that students there would be offered legal music downloads starting the spring semester, Penn State President Graham B. Spanier announced today that his University has signed an agreement with Napster to launch a program in which Penn State will make Napster's Premium Service available at no cost to its students. This comes from the annual EDUCAUSE meeting of thousands of information technology administrators from universities around the country. Most notably are the panelists who are part of a P2P file sharing disscussion. They include, Cary Sherman of the RIAA, Jack Valenti of the MPAA, the Provost of the University of Rochester, and the President of Penn State. Too bad it's Napster and not iTunes.
You know what they need next?
They need to charge students $500 per semester so they can be provided with a free X-Box and games. Oh, and another $300 so they can watch free movies.
What fucking robbery. Why the hell is a university buying entertainment services for its students rather than letting them spend their own damn money?