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.

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?

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?

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

[acaben]

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.

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

[Suppafly]

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?

Yeh, and I'm sure they'd refund them just like the refund fees for blind people that don't watch tv and fat people that don't use the rec. center and crippled people that can't use the pool.

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%?

Not Free

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Re:wine

[Pompatus]

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."

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.