Slashdot Mirror
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.
About 350 years ago, a wealthy Brit was granted a lot of land on the American continent by the British monarchy. His name, William Penn. After the colonies revolted against the British crown, the colonies coagulated into states. Penn's state was big enough that it didn't need to coagulate into a larger territory, so it remained as it was: Penn State.
One of the legacies of Penn is a love of freedom, and this latest embrace of P2P by Penn State is another in a long string of "Live Free or Die" actions.
The story of Penn State is long and quite profound, but it's not quite pertinent to this discussion (except for the love of freedom stuff).
Iirc those worked at 2400 baud, just like every modem above 2400 kbps.
baud != bits per second, baud is transitions per second, the bitrate depends on the baudrate and the modulation.
Jason Schultz (staff attorney the EFF) has some figures in his blog. He reckons the figure is just over 15% of students using the (crippled) service. ISTR you can't play the music anymore once you leave Penn State. A ringing endorsement for sure!
About 350 years ago, a wealthy Brit was granted a lot of land on the American continent by the British monarchy. His name, William Penn. After the colonies revolted against the British crown, the colonies coagulated into states. Penn's state was big enough that it didn't need to coagulate into a larger territory, so it remained as it was: Penn State.
One of the legacies of Penn is a love of freedom, and this latest embrace of P2P by Penn State is another in a long string of "Live Free or Die" actions.
The story of Penn State is long and quite profound, but it's not quite pertinent to this discussion (except for the love of freedom stuff).
Great. Now for the Rest of the Story, told by someone who actually lives in "Penn State".
"Penn State", as the above (non-American) poster uses it, is actually the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. (Derived from founder William Penn, "Pennsylvania" is composed from "Penn" and "Sylvania", and generally means "Penn's Woods".) Pennsylvania is one of two commonwealths (not strictly states) in the U.S.; Massachusetts is the other. (The difference is largely semantic to someone not interested in political theory and the like.) Pennsylvania is the only of the original 13 Colonies that does not have a border on the Atlantic Ocean; it is bordered by New York to the north, Ohio to the west, New Jersey to the east, and West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware to the south. The only coastline Pennsylvania has is in the northwest region, on Lake Erie; the city of Erie (home to Gannon University) is an important port along the Great Lakes.
"Penn State" is the abbreviated nickname for Pennsylvania State University, a governmental-run university with its head campus in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (the state capital); there are a grand total of 18 satellite campuses throughout Pennsylvania. Penn State is known for its football team, the Nittany Lions. For any more detailed information, check the link. (I went to Gannon, so I could tell you more about that school.)
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
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.
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.
If you're from out of the country, then perhaps it would help to clarify that all schools are very different from one another. While Penn State is a state school and thus funded by its local state government (among other sources I'm sure), it is run by the administration of Penn State. Other schools are run by their own respective administrations.
Each administration decides on its own what's worth spending money on and what's not. Penn State decided this was a worthwhile investment for its student body and other schools have not. Personally, I would side with the other schools if I were a student at Penn State, but as I'm not, I couldn't care less.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
I go there. I also work for a helpdesk for the students on campus. There's not much to comment on yet. It's only been in operationg for students for a few days. The intrface sucks and I wish they went with iTunes, but oh well. The only thing I've heard from students so far is some odd errors they recieve when trying to get their napster client setup. Nothing exciting from this report. :)
Who's the black private dick, who's a sex machine for all the chicks?
The central campus for Penn State is actually in University Park, PA (near State College, PA), which is near the geographical center of the state. The Harrisburg campus is a branch campus. You may be thinking of the state capitol, which is in Harrisburg.
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.
Looks like Penn State is getting Napster for free. There are (well-founded IMO) allegations of a conflict of interest on the part of one Barry Robinson who is not only a trustee of Penn State, but also an RIAA lawyer.
PSU gets Napster because they initiated a deal with the RIAA to keep the legal hounds at bay. In exchange for working on this service, PSU students were largely spared the music industry crack-down.
All Universities have the option to develop similar programs to this, but this one specifically was an initiative conducted by PSU.
The Commonwealth of Virginia!
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
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.
bzzzzt...WRONG!
There are two more commonwealth states you are forgetting about. Kentucky and Virginia are also Commonwealth states.
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