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Penn State Launches Napster Music Service

Posted by timothy on from the so-that's-what-college-was-for dept.

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.

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  1. Behind the scenes at Penn State's Napster by Debian+Troll's+Best · · Score: 1, Troll
    We certainly should all congratulate Penn State on taking a bold step forward in making online music both accessible and legal. Sure, Apple and iTunes have done a lot in this area already, but what makes this service particularly interesting is that it deliberately targets a group of the population disproportionately represented amongst illegal P2P downloaders: college students. It's a step in the right direction.

    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!