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Penn State Launches Napster Music Service
Owner of Azkaban writes "CNN has a story about PSU launching Napster for its own students." Also at live.psu.edu." This is the service we posted about last fall; in three days, the Penn State system has served more than 100,000 songs.
This is old news, I was using Napster years ago. And back then it was free! Of course, we had to walk 15 miles uphill both ways in snow to get our music over a 9600 baud connection...
Bah, I got nothing.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
The SCO group and the RIAA have joined forces, and cross licensed each other's IP. the RIAA is now going to start randomly suing linux users, and SCO will be going after several thousand penn state students.
In other words, nothing has changed. move along now
Why would they open themselves up to this kind of legal problem? Let the kids share and suffer the consequences, don't bring the school into the picture!
I have been pwned because my
at my uni the DC++ network isn't reachable from uni computers but is from personal computers in campus accommodation. it's so easy and fast a non-free service couldn't compete on equal terms.
Well, it looks like Napster is finally back, but only for "Educational Use Only"
From the state that brings you Hershey chocolate! Now they're bringing you something else to feed your laziness! I guess it's all about convenience.
Anyone currently going to Penn State care to comment?
Read his name and look at his posting history. He's a 100% karma whore and, more often than not, a pathetic little troll. Spend your mod points on someone else worthy of them.
out of some odd 83k in the school, only 100k songs in three days? That is less then 2 songs per person, over three days. Regardless at least someone is getting a bigger cut (RIAA, Artist, Napster, whatever)
Technically though, some have claimed that the Penn State initiative is nothing to write home about. Sure, Napster was exciting 3 or 4 years ago, but it's just another P2P app, and one which critics have (quite deservedly, in my opinion) claimed doesn't scale. When you're talking about a university campus, with thousands of users all packed into a small geographic area, all connected to high speed LAN links, scalability is critical. The old Napster architecture wouldn't cope. Fortunately the Penn State administrators saw this problem coming, and sent out a white paper a few months back calling for suggestions and tenders. Given my previous experiences with large organizations rolling out similar file sharing systems, I thought I could help. And what we came up with at Penn State is something really beyond Napster. It's taking it to the next level. It's open source, and it leverages existing file sharing technologies. Yes, it's based on apt-get.
If there's one thing that being a Debian user has shown me, it's that Debian and apt-get are up to the sustained pressure of 24/7 file distribution. Those Debian mirrors take a hammering! Nobody loves to update their distro using apt-get more often than I do (I know, I've checked the update logs at mirror.debian.org). So in a way apt-get was tailor made for this kind of thing. The one thing that was missing though was a Digital Rights Management system, or DRM.
Now some of you out there will argue that just because apt-get is covered under the GPL, that we couldn't alter it with a DRM layer and not give back to the community. Well that's OK, because we re-licensed it under the BSD license which allows that kind of thing. I think re-licensing is mentioned somewhere in the GPL, but it's further than most people read. Our DRM system is pretty secure, because it's based on the same encryption technology that UNIX uses...crypt(). You won't be seeing students be cracking our apt-get DRM enabled system any time soon, let me tell you!
So basically the whole Penn State Napter thing is powered by apt-get behind that great GUI. But it doesn't end there. We've also been approached by some fairly major software vendors who are interested in using our new apt-get-DRM system to roll out an entirely Digitally Rights Managed version of Linux. Apparently it's been a bit of a hold-up for some major corporates, but a locked down, secure, DRM'ed OS was exactly what they needed. I've even suggested this on a few of the Debian mailing lists where I am a regular, and let me tell you the response was enthusiastic! So hopefully we'll see a little more protection of intellectual property in apt-get and Debian in the future.
Happy (safe) downloading, Penn State students!
About 6 songs per student. (17k)
That's what I get for knee-jerk posting.
What is a "Penn state" ??
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Bob
Despite all the arguments to the contrary music 'sharing' is piracy
I guess some people will not truely understand the different between copyright infringment and piracy until they are killed on the high seas by people with eye patches who go "Arrrrg!"
and in the long term it can only hurt the consumer as musicians will not make music if there is no profit on it.
Not as long as the majority of music downloaders use p2p primarily to search for new music and purchase the stuff they like.
I expressly banned my son from pirating music but the other day I saw him playing an MP3.
The horror! An mp3!
Where did it come from?
Did he download it from a bands official website where they promote their music by providing free samples?
Did he rip it himself from one of his legally purchased CDs?
Well, obviously copying of any sort is the equivilant of looting and murder on the high seas.
The office of homeland security will be by soon to escort your son to his new cave in Siberia where he will be spending the rest of his life. In fact, it is obvious that you haven't done enough to instill in your son the belief that he doesn't have the right to do whatever he wants with his own property. I guess you will have to be deported too you terrorist! You're no better than the parents of John Walker!
Nobody died when Nixon lied.
I'm meeting you half way you stupid hippies!
Uni's and schools get very big discounts on Software and other items, so why not music as well?
Maybe they got a site license discount on the assumption that a smallish percentage of the students will actually use this service.
Either way - its a great service for the students, and its a fantastic marketing tool for the Uni- get a degree and we throw in free music downloads!
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
You'll be telling me next that Cadbury have started producing chocolate!
Oxford Dictionaries Online
Penn State is a nickname for Pennsylvania State University, a public university in a certain northeastern US state.
Here is a nice prophetic article from more than two years ago.
So have fun fighting the battle against [DRM] but please do not be surprised when you fail. After all the war has been lost, long live the new world order: proprietary devices, proprietary interfaces, copy protection, limited functionality, and prepare you credit card accounts for all those monthly rental and service charges you will be paying for every "computer controller consumer electronics device" you use.
Every inroad that DRM makes, every time a service like this or the iTMS is lauded here where the only chance toward resistance should reside, the hope for an open future slips further and further away. Every time somebody sits down at a computer and accepts that the software decides how and what he is allowed to communicate, every person that buys the line that is good when he tied down because it helps keep him honest. Every programmer who writes software whose purpose is to betray and control the person who runs it. Every person who reads a UELA that says the software has the right to delete information and other software against the users wishes and shrugs.
Anyone who believes that ubiquitous DRM can coexist with open networks, open communication, and open software is deluding himself. Either these services fail, or everything that this site was created to celebrate does. Our network has only one future.
I've always thought "doing time in the Penn" means being in prison...
Did he rip it himself from one of his legally purchased CDs?
IANAL.
It should be remembered that most music recordings have several copyrights on them. As well as having a copyright on the lyrics and the musical works there is usually also a copyright on the sound recording, which means that you aren't allowed to re-record the copy for either backup purposes or personal use (eg ripping a CD to MP3).
Scary isn't it!
which comes free with their tuition.
The article says that the service is "free", but in actuality, students are paying for it in their tuition, when they could be having more useful services provided by the school, like a site license for more online research databases, or simple more trees and benches on campus.
What a waste.
And then students are told that it's "free", I bet half of them even beleave it, but as the old saying goes, "There's no free lunch", McBride seams to think there is no free SCO/linux(tm)*, and there is also no free napster.
*Largly due to the fact that he's visualy inspecting the interior of his own colon.
Less look fast, more go fast.
...going to set up a tunnel through his machine to allow us to connect to the service through his machine?
Hell, I'd even send him a micro-payment for that!
This is the best news of the day. Can anybody say innovation at it's peak pressure point?
... preferably as a firebird plugin)
:)
Put 83,000 students into a tight music DRM situation and let them go at it. Then mix in a campus that is dedicated to tech education and place development tools within easy reach of everybody.
This *IS THE* brewing pot where xBSD, Linux, Apache, Samba, Bind, Sendmail, GNOME thrived.
It is a force economy verses the the force of innovation. History has shown that economy takes a good beating to innovation at first. Then economy jumps on the innovation train.
I'm expecting the following projects to hop out of the kettle:
Web based DRM stripping
Web based streaming of DRM music
Web based ripping of stripped music
(Yes, the three above in a web browser
A new P2P scheme that works against most monitoring systems.
A scheme for the encryption of local music files within a P2P system. And yes, a method of playing the encrypted music. Harder to prove if the evidence is locked up..
Yes, I have some big expectations.....
Ok, so I hear you all bitching and whining about DRM, but it's not really a big deal. After all, you can play the songs for free -- just not copy to another device. And if you can play the songs then it means that WMP has got to the stage of decoding the WMA file.
After that it's pretty simple. Insert a hook into WMP software (Google for 'wmrip') to write the un-DRMed data to a separate file. And there you have it -- a WMA file that you can keep.
A simple solution, really.
OK now prehaps this might be seens as a troll but being outside the US is there any special reason Penn State gets napster? Why not all universities?
Rus
CPanel + Root from $35/mo - 10% off with discount code SLASHDOT
I guess some people will not truely understand the different between copyright infringment and piracy until they are killed on the high seas by people with eye patches who go "Arrrrg!"
/. article without someone pointing out the difference between piracy and copyright infringement. Arrr!
I guess this wouldn't be a
As well as having a copyright on the lyrics and the musical works there is usually also a copyright on the sound recording, which means that you aren't allowed to re-record the copy for either backup purposes or personal use
I think the point is that the different copyrights prevent you from doing different things. The copyright on the lyrics or the tune prevent me from going to a local recording studio and playing my own version of it. I haven't infringed the copyright the RIAA is concerned with, but it's still illegal. Making backup copies etc which although would seem to infringe the sound recording copyright, still comes under the terms of fair-use, and as such is not illegal.
Then again, just like you, IANAL.
Not necessarily. In the UK at least.
I was speaking to a lawyer friend of mine and he was explaining that "theft" is an extremely complex area of the law and it is entirely possible that if a judge decided that what you have done should be classed as theft, then that is what you'll get charged under.
Couple of examples: British Rail vs a ticket tout. British Rail claimed that the ticket tout was stealing (theft) from them by reselling tickets. Despite the fact that the tickets had been legitimately bought and could be used over and over again - they claimed that it was theft of potential revenues. They won.
One other example: If you managed to find a way to take money from other peoples bank accounts and put it into yours. Technically until you take out the money, you haven't stolen anything. It's just an additional number of zeros added to the end of your bank balance. However - in the eyes of the law, you have stolen and you can be tried and sent to prison for theft (and people have) even though you haven't actually stolen anything.
What I'm trying to say is that although Slashdotters like to think that "theft" and "copyright infringement" are two completely seperate and distinct things (and even I think that too), the law regarding the two is a lot more complex and often means that they cross heavily into each other.
In summary: In the UK at least, when people talk about theft of music by digital copying, they're not completely wrong - but they aren't completely right either.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
"as musicians will not make music if there is no profit on it."
It is really very sad to view art in this fashion, as if art was only made for profit. I have been an artist most of my life(musician, painter, writer) and I have never made a bit of art becuase I thought it would make money(I'm not saying I wouldnt be pleased if it did). NO ONE thinks, "Hey I'll become a painter and gets lots of money." It would be much more realistic to think, "I'll try to be a painter and be very poor". Real artists make art because they are compelled to do so, and simply love creating. Real artists do NOT include entertainers such as Britney Spears or the like.
Again its very sad to see people viewing art through a very narrow capitolistic frame.
The guy you replied to is trolling - but yes, that is an oft-believed untruth, and I concur wholeheartedly with your response.
The number quoted includes streamed content.
As far as I understood, the service is "free" for the streaming content, which usually costs a subscription free, but to burn the songs, a separate purchase fee must be paid.
It would be interesting to see the breakdown b/w streamed content versus "paid" download content. I have a feeling for actual purchases, it would be a low number. However, if I were living on campus with access to broadband and free streaming, I'd be using it all the time! So the number is actually a bit low in my book.
-B
Many universities are now pushing hard to become better places to live. Services like this are only the beginning as they try and sex up to lure the dollars in. The days of schools being strictly for schooling are long past and now they are more koosh hotels with the occasional bit of info thrown in for good measure.
Just in case it wasn't and you been in a hole for last year.
This is the new napster. The commercial one, that signed a contract with penn state to take part of the kids fees and give them to the RIAA because madonna is starving to death. Or something like that anyway.
It is legal. Well legal from the RIAA point of view. That of course people with non-ms os (or how about those without a computer? or who don't like riaa music?) have to pay for it yet can't use it is merely one of those boring side effects. (Can you force people to pay for something they can't use?)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
wow dude, what kind of messed up parent are you? Your kid is going to grow up with some serious repression issues and want to kill things. I guess killing things is better than piracy to you though, isn't it?
(just so I don't get flamed I am half joking here.... or am I?)
Not as long as the majority of music downloaders use p2p primarily to search for new music and purchase the stuff they like.
Now, I'm not necessarily doubting the veracity of your claim, but I see that brought up here everytime there's a RIAA vs. World story, and I don't remember ever having seen any hard evidence to back it up.
Sure, I've seen lots of anecdotal evidence, from people here saying that that's what they do, but that doesn't actually prove anything. They could be telling the truth, they could be lying; either way, they may well not be representative of P2P users in general.
Do you (or anyone else reading this) actually have any hard data to support this sort of claim? If nothing else, it would be useful ammunition.
Not that it really matters either way to me, I guess - here in the UK, beneficial or not, copyright law (as I understand it - IANAL, etc) forbids unauthorised copying full stop. That includes ripping CDs I've bought to mp3, or taping them to play in a car cassette player, etc. Ain't the lack of a fair use clause grand?
Oh, and for what it's worth, the whole "piracy vs copyright infringement" argument is pretty much a lost cause unfortunately, just like "hacker vs cracker", especially as it's now in the dictionary. I personally wouldn't waste too much time or effort pursuing it; you're not going to convince people to change now. At worst, you'll just end up confusing the issue, and detracting from your main points.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The Commonwealth of Virginia!
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
I run LOCA records and I've been thinking that a wrapper that expressly indicates the copyleft properties of a song would be a superb step forward as any kind of sharing method would just check that the wrapper was in place. This could be linked to the Creative Commons licenses so that people can find out more information.
Question is the technical issue of implementation - it really would need to be an extension of the MP3 standard (or Ogg) and would have to be non-changable and able to convince a court should anyone wishing to defend their swapping need to do so.
Maybe a third-party Verisign-type music label could be the answer that holds a database of public domain tracks that 'signs' the MP3 and which can then be checked against in a database?
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
Doeasn't napster use WMA files now???
Does this mean when the students leave PSU that all their music will stop working?
Evolution or ID?
If that's true, then the law is wrong, and the only solution is civil disobedience. If I obtained a music recording legally, then I'll be damned if anyone is going to tell me I can't back it up or convert it to MP3 to play in my car.
The guy who is against copyright infringement is modded a "troll"
Whereas, the guy who:
- Misunderstands the fact that words' meanings evolve over time (probably one of those "hacker" vs "cracker" guys, too)
- Engages in silly borderline counterexamples in order to distract attention from the main topic at hand (this bit about "legally obtained MP3s") (remember: we're not talking about the general case here - we're talking about the case where ONE guy who KNOWS his son's behavior patterns has made a decision)
- Engages in ridiculous slippery slope arguments essentially (though perhaps with some miguided attempt at humor) equating a responsible parent with a terrorist.
is modded up as "insightful".What an upside down world this slashdot is.
Parent is troll and just cutting and pasting this comment in to every article, see Oct 22/2003 comment
Very well-said if I may say so myself.
I guess some people will not truely understand the different between copyright infringment and piracy until they are killed on the high seas by people with eye patches who go "Arrrrg!"
As a true sea lubbin' pirate, matey, I have to correct you in that the proper way of vocalizing our fervor would be "Yaaaar!"
The term "Arrrg!" is reserved for when a mislabeled MP3 suddenly blasts Celine Dion from the masts and me crew tries to kick down the door and have me walk the plank.
It's a tough life, aye.
IIRC, they had the cheapest pitchers, and the best overplayed 70's songs. I never went into the Lion's Den, just the Brickhouse (sadly demolished, the dirt floor gave it such class), the Scorpion, the Skellar, Zenos, and Crumley's once or twice.
Yarr! Beware of bootleggers!
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
IANAL, but my understanding is that in the U.S., and I would assume other places such as U.K. as well, theft is a criminal matter, while copyright infringement is a civil matter - two completely different areas of the law, regardless of the "similarities". I believe this is part of the reason that slashdotters often disagree with the usage of the word "theft" in conjunction with copyright law.
Wow, someone who actually remembers there was a rivalry between the two! I knew it was over when my fanatical, hard-core Pitt fan cousin agreed to let his daughter go to Penn State if she wanted to.
:(
When it comes to football, I can't argue with you. Pitt is doing much better.
One piece of this that is not getting much attention right now (that would probably be of interest to /. readers) is the registration system. I'm not getting into the politics of this, the DRM or the "right or wrong" arguments.
In this initial rollout PSU and Napster decided to limit the service to students living in the residence halls. It does not matter which of the 21 campuses you are on, just that you live in a res hall.
We also needed to ACTIVELY protect the privacy of the students, not just to comply with FERPA but because we are not in the business of providing marketing data to private institutions.
The way we went about this was to use the Internet2 Middleware Initiative's Shibboleth software. Similar to Liberty in that it is a federated single sign on system that uses SAML, it is one of the unsung heros in this.
Without getting into TOO much low level detail of how Shib works (which is available at the above link for those interested), here is a quick overview of what we are doing:
Basically PSU students are redirected to Napster's shibboleth protected registration webpage (this shib component is an Apache auth module) which sends them back to a PSU server to do the actual authentication. The student authenticates to the web server (kerberos backended userid and password). This server is also a component of Shib and it redirects the user (actually an http post) back to the Napster reg system along with a SAML authentication assertion.
The SAML authentication assertion is a blob of XML data that contains an opaque handle for the user (used in the next step) and a URI back to the last piece of Shibboleth at PSU called the Attribute Authority. This assertion is also digitally signed with an x.509 cert (w3c's XML-Signature spec) so that Napster knows it can trust this (not tampered with, generated from a rogue "man in the middle" server, etc).
The last step is when Napster makes an SSL wrapped call to the Attribute Authority requesting attributes about the student who is trying to get in. Remember up to this point all they know is his opaque handle (long string of numbers which uniquely identifies the user, but provides no information). The Attribute Authority looks as the cert of the requesting server, sees that it is Napster and queries LDAP for the data about the user that it is allowed to release. This is configurable to be anything we have, name, email, address, department, semester standing, etc. HOWEVER we only pass TWO things to Napster. (1) an entitlement string that identifies whether or not that user is allowed to get this service, and (2) a persistent opaque handle, which is basically the userID encrypted with the name of the target site and a secret seed value.
The entitlement string is generated at PSU and is populated in the user's LDAP entry based on the criteria that was set (res hall students only for now) and the persistent opaque handle gives Napster something to look at to make sure each students only registers once, but they still have no idea who that user is or anything about them other than that they are a student at PSU in a res hall.
Now if the student chooses to use their PSU email address when creating their Napster account, or gives them their CC number because they want to purchase songs that is their decision. The doubleplus good factor here is that PSU does not give that data up. We merely assert on the user's behalf that they are allowed to sign up under this agreement.
This Shibboleth stuff is running on Linux at both places and with the exception of requiring Java at the Origin end (PSU), is entirely comprised of open source software. The Napster guys we worked with were also very clueful and were definitely down with Linux, using it except where Windows was necessary (WMA streaming)
So I are very pleased at what
As a Pitt fan, trust me, there still is a Rivalry (at least on our side of the fence). My son is now six months old. If, when he turns 18, he decides to attend that evil school in State College, I'll write him out of my will. If he decides to attend West Virginia University, same thing.
Otherwise, he can pretty much go wherever he wants. Except for any ACC school. Those bastards.
Oh, and Pitt is ALSO a much better men's basketball team. Women's hoops? I give Penn State *some* credit. They are better in that sport.
I know all of the rhetoric, like this is "a step in the right direction" but I can't say that I am all that excited. I can't use this service as I live off-campus, don't use XP or 2k and I am not particulary fond of WMA. Not that I am really angry about it (unless my activity fees increase), but I am just not all that excited either. In addition, from my on campus friends, most of them said that it was a lacking in user interface but was still manageable. The biggest gripe was that a lot of artists/songs (popular ones) are no where to be found.
For you foreigners, this is a 'Pitt'.
... and we have a supercomputers
It all boils down to this...
Pitt versus Penn State
Culture versus Agriculture
In my opintion this is just going to get the kids who don't file share to start. Those kids who haven't used Napster, Kazaa etc. are going to see how great it is to get free software and music that they will just go get kazaa and then they will think there is no problem sharing music. Thus like other people have said, cause so much trouble down the road that the school wish they never even considered this idea. The use and idea of Napster to me is pretty much dead. Kazaa, dead. Kazaa K++, still alive but dying. I belive Emule is where the sharing wil continue. But we will just have to see. I am keen to see how this issue works out!
WE ARE! (beers to the frist Penn Stater to reply to this correctly)
The Scorpion was in the alley between Beaver and College, mostly live hippy and reggae bands. The Brickhouse was up the street from the 'Skellar, nestled into a small lot near the parking garage. It was tiny, the front room had a pool table, the back room had a bar with four picnic tables, and it was dirt floored. The stage was smaller than my work cube. It was a dive, but it was fun.
Well, I can say they must be hoping the service grows rapidly, otherwise, they've wasted a lot of money. Come on, the University Park campus of PSU alone hosts more than 40,000 students (undergraduate and graduate). Which kind of makes the 100,000 songs the equivalent of 2.5 songs per person at a single campus (PSU has over 20 campuses-admittedly most of them are pretty small).
I admit to expecting that even if the service didn't fly, and most people hated it, that it would still serve over 400,000 songs per day. I just assume if that less than half of all PSU students participated that would still be around 40-50,000 (possibly more, its been along time since I went to PSU) students, then if each student that participated streamed 10 songs per day (I could be high, but that's about an hour of music).
Yeah, its still early, but I would have waited for more impressive results before posting those numbers.
Barry Robinson, a Penn State trustee, is also on the legal council for the RIAA. He has, though, denied influencing the decision to adopt Napster.
Penn State is ridiculous with file-sharing, though. 1.5 gig a month limits on downloads, and campus judicial system prosecution for sharing files are standard on campus. As are repeated e-mails about how horrible sharing files is to the industry.
- "By Monday, more than 8,000 visits were logged on the Napster Web site"
and think I'd read- "By Monday, more than 8,000 idiots were logged on the Napster Web site".
Somewhere, deep in my subconscious, I guess my early-morning brain does all my translations and fact-checking for me...I personally encourage my daughter to use mp3's by buying her an mp3 player, pointing her at these highly evil underground music sources like iuma.org and showing her how to make the members of bands like Metallica extremely poor by ripping her own cd's.
I enjoy helping create an extreme criminal of my daughter... she also enjoy's stealing from the poor tv executives by watching spongebob episodes on her laptop that she grabs from the freevo I have running downstairs..
Tommorow I'm going to show her how to use encryption so that she can become a terrorist!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Great... one more nail in the coffin. Why should anyone at penn state get a Mac or Linux machine if they get "napster" for free. (I know its not free, but if it comes out of your tuition, it appears free). Way to go penn state... Oh well good thing I go to Michigan. They seem to support anything under the sun.
I remember when it was ths students launching their own napster services.
"DRM on my business documents?! F-ing A, no way. Wait. ... Oooh ... music..."
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
HIRE SPURRIER. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. GET RID OF JOE . he's a nice man, but his time ended about 8 years ago. ...class of '81
"with its head campus in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania"
Close, but incorrect. The head campus is in a town called "State College". The capitol campus is a bunion on the entire system with their "Back-uh-lariot" degree.
... for a University (goverment University it seems, for what I have read here) to enable such "service"?
If such thing would be procured on my native Mexico on a public University the university's director wold find himself without a job in a very short time...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Everytime the subject of DRM and CD's is raised on /., someone posts this troll.
Because sports define a school. Stupid stupid Pitt fuckos. The CMU students taking general education credits at Pitt is the only saving factor. Cock suckers
So I are very pleased at what I2 has done with Shib
Ummmmm yeah. This started out as "we are very pleased" then I decided I should not speak for the entire University.
Subject/verb agreement, my old nemesis, we meet again.
Finkployd
I agree, but...
It would be much more realistic to think, "I'll try to be a painter and be very poor". Real artists make art because they are compelled to do so, and simply love creating.
NO ONE thinks, "Hey I'll become a painter and gets lots of money."
Which would, of course, explain why books, paintings, music, and software are sold, right?
Or do you expect artists to simply live off of thin air for the sake of your anti-capitalism? For God's sake man, what are these artists going to eat? Are you honestly asserting that artists do not have the right to profit from their intellectual property?
(On a semi-related note, this is why I oppose such things as copyright infringement on music: you're depriving the artist of royalties.)
Real artists make art because they are compelled to do so, and simply love creating. Real artists do NOT include entertainers such as Britney Spears or the like.
And what, praytell, is a "REAL artist?" Why is Britney Spears not an artist, while, say, Mozart is? Is it that you just don't like the popularization of art? Or are you simply too elitist to appreciate the "non-real art" that those (*shudder*) uneducated common folks listen to/watch/use/observe?
Again its very sad to see people viewing art through a very narrow capitolistic frame.
Again, it's very sad to see people who think artists don't have to eat.
I have discovered a truly marvelous
Where did I state that artists dont deserve to make ANY money from thier work?
A real artist is someone that makes art for the sake of making art, because they have something to say, and are driven to say it regardless of poverty.
Britney Spears is not an artist.
As I stated before, I am an artist, I am poor, I know exactly what it is to be an artist.
It's a prison.
Wait, am I thinking of a State Pen.?
qntm.org
If I'm reading the FAQ correctly then it looks to me like students at PSU can stream any song that they want but if they want to actually put it on an iPod^H^H^H^HiRiver or whatever then they actually have to shell out their own money for the track that they then can keep for playing away from their computer.
Also, since this is a service that is drawn from out of the students' tuition fees that means that everybody is paying for it. What about people with a Mac? What about Linux/BSD geeks?
There are a lot of services that I pay on my tuition that I don't actively take advantage of (health services, gym, etc.) but at least with those I can say, "Well, I may be paying for them but at any time I can begin to take advantage of the services that I'm paying for just buy walking over to the Gym" However, in this situation if all I had was my PowerBook I would be paying for a service that I `literally` could not take advantage of. I'm paying for a service that in no way can be used without me investing in a Wintel XP/2000 PC. That sucks.
P.S.
I want to clarify one point:
Would you rather the RIAA go after every student who has MP3s on their machine?
(A) MP3's are not illegal.
(B) I want some member of the RIAA to break ranks with the cartel and start SELLING MP3's. That label would absolutely mop up the download market. It would absolutely slaughter every single DRM crippled music service. Everyone else would have to follow suit or quit the business.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
...and I have to say that this is just hell. Our tuition has gone up every year since I started school(now in my 5th year) with no signs of showing up. Our school had a surplus of money this year due to the fact that they cancelled their contract with Microsoft and stopped handing out free MS software. Should they have lowered tuition or perhaps gave out free textbooks or bought students free BWMs? Maybe...but I think the money definitely should have not been wasted on something as stupid as Napster. I simply had to boot into windows and check out what the fuss was about. Napster, the new Napster at least, is crap. The UI is crap, it takes over your system, and is plain clunky. Its "always on top" and has few options to change its behavior. And on top of this, Penn State has only paid for streaming music. What this means is that at a max of 96kbps, you can listen to *select* songs by streaming them to your computer at inferior quality. I listen to music that is mostly not mainstream, so finding any songs I like is difficult at best. What this does is cost Penn State students money by paying tution for a useless service, and gain Napster money by coercing students into buying songs at better quality. I'm just glad I'm graduating this semester. The situation at Penn State has gotten worse every year I've been here. Good day all.
Remember that the 100,000 songs include songs that have been streamed, not just purchased (or is it rented?). So much of this 100,000 could just be the result of an on campus eatery or coffee shop (or 2) streaming the music while they are open for the past 3 days...
Schnapple
It's not part of the SSHE [http://www.sshechan.edu/] and Penn State receives less than 50% of it's funding from public monies.
So, let's get this straight.
The guy who is against copyright infringement is modded a "troll"
What an upside down world this slashdot is.
You are defending a genuine Troll.
If you review PhysicExpert's post history you'll find he makes contradictory statments and blatantly false statments and mock-naive statments and inflamitory statments and bigoted statement - whatever it takes to get people to bite, often as many as 10 or 11 replies.
His hook here was "I expressly banned my son from pirating music but the other day I saw him playing an MP3" and his silly punnishment "Now I've put a short script on his computer that will delete a random file from his userspace whenever he attempts to play an MP3".
PhysicExpert pretended to say playing an MP3 = piracy and to insinuate that P2P was evil. Anything else he said in the post was just window dressing to bait the hook.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Nothing like publicity to turn your server into SLAG!!!
have lived here all my life.
It's a university in the USA
Not to mention the number of Macs in use
(a large percentage of which have SOME knowlege
of the happenings of the company that made their computer.)
What in the hell us a fucko? Obviously, you Carnegie-Mellon students never learned to spell.
CMU students - Overrated, Celibate, Arrogant Geeks.
IST at psu is a joke.
Its like majoring in Microsoft Office.
They cant do anything. They have almost no work to do. Their classes are soooo easy, and yet they complain all the time about how bad they have it...
Even the Liberal Arts majors make fun of them for how useless they are.
"I guess some people will not truely understand the different between copyright infringment and piracy until they are killed on the high seas by people with eye patches who go "Arrrrg!""
Huh? The word "piracy" has been synonymous with copyright infringement for quite a while. As far back as the late 70's I remember it being used to describe copyright infringement of software for the Apple ][ (and software pirates happily called themselves just that), and I'm told that its origins are almost a century old.
"Well, obviously copying of any sort is the equivilant of looting and murder on the high seas."
Oh, please -- you already know that nobody is implying this. It is simply a word with multiple meanings (Four, according to one dictionary). There are lots of words in the English language which have multiple meanings. "Polish" is one. "Faggot" is another. Some words have dozens. Come on, folks -- this isn't a concept worth getting upset over. There's just no percentage in trumpeting one's lack of understanding of the English language.
I hope the implication isn't that it's okay to say "software piracy" but somehow "music piracy" isn't a valid term, as if it's possible to pirate one but not the other. This gets dangerously close to putting intrinsic values on different art forms. Creating music can be just as hard -- if not harder -- than writing software, and musicians deserve the same level of respect given to any other type of artist or creator of intellectual property.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
as well.
Read the terms very carefully.
Subscribers can include their pre-existing MP3 collections in the Crapster2 service, since the university is picking up the bill, that means THEY KNOW and monitor your music collection.
So it's your job to spread the word and halt this invasion of privacy, print up flyers, spread the word.
Penn State President loves Microsoft, Napster, the RIAA and Al Gore (true)
...Praise to El Reg for doing that thing many American journalists seem to have forgotten to do: investigative reporting.
There is magic behind Penn State's Napster deal
Penn State trustee and RIAA lawyer denies conflict of interests
-- haaz.
It's certainly the case in my country (Australia).
FAQ sheet from Australian Copyright Council (an independent non-profit organisation) says:
"There is no special exemption which allows copying of CDs or cassettes for private use".
from the article "...more than 2,600 students had registered for the Napster 2.0 service, which comes free with their tuition."
Napster must be getting something out of this. As a college student I know that the words free with tuition are a load of bull****.
I'm a current Penn State Student attending the main campus here at University Park. Napster has been rolled out to anyone living on campus, and has been in our local newspapers for at least the past week, never mind the build up of news about it before it was actually implimented.
The new Napster service is utter crap. There are many reasons for this which I shall list:
1. Not even close to a complete library of songs
2. Tethered downloads are only tethered to idiots.
3. All files are provided at poor quality (128kbps for purchased songs, 96 for streams)
These are the main reasons, but there are certainly more. To address the first issue: what songs are present on this new Napster service? Answer: A shoddy collection of pop and mainstream music the RIAA wants you to hear. Not present are loads of classic (rock, folk, etc.)artists, underground or "garage" bands, electronic music, foreign music and so on. Basically if it didn't have a multimillion dollar advertising campaign behind it at some point, it's not there. They're even complaining about "current hits" not being available. (Not that I'd know, since I don't listen to anything played on FCC governed radio.)
Number two, the "teathered downloads." These downloads are teathered to those who don't use computers very often. Those who do can easily figure out a way to take the low quallity songs and get them into a format suitable for burning etc. Those who can't do this more than likely know somebody who can, or at least live on a floor with one. So much for the tethering.
Last, but not finally, is the poor quality of all the songs. Who would want to pay for 128kps quality? I guess if you're streaming, you're not exactly looking for audiophile quality, but over a dollar for 128kpbs? Are you kidding?
All this new Napster software is, is a way for the University to generate some good PR with the RIAA, the RIAA can quote the rollout of this service and the "great reduction in illegal music piracy" that it brings. In actuallity, all the people who used Napster BEFORE it was in the news, and were using Kazaa BEFORE everyone else will continue trading songs with all the other tech-proficient obscure-music-loving people on the internet. The new Napster is merely a diversion for those with a passing fad's interest in filesharing, and if the RIAA is happy with that, that's good enough for me. At least there's the possiblitiy that they won't reduce bandwidth usage on campus anymore than they have. (1.5 GB down and 1.5 up a week). That was already more pressure than the RIAA should be allowed to exert on anybody. Btw, the Napster servers that aren't PSU exclusive count against student's weekly bandwidth allocations, even though Napster and the University claims they do not. (Only the PSU servers do not count as external traffic.)