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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.
Windows (sepecially server 2003) could be an option if it wasn't for the standard critical patches needing deployment every few weeks. Napster does not change this.
Linux support for DWO is still not there. Unfortunate for this otherwise solid choice, but it's true.
In the end I created my own, and I stand by my decision. A much more viable alternative.
I am seriously worried by the number of new file sharing services that seem to be popping up. Despite all the arguments to the contrary music 'sharing' is piracy and in the long term it can only hurt the consumer as musicians will not make music if there is no profit on it.
The worst thing about it is that our children are growing up thinking that stealing is ok. I expressly banned my son from pirating music but the other day I saw him playing an MP3. Needless to say I've now taken all his CD's away from him in order to teach him a lesson but I doubt his is old enough to understand why filesharing is wrong. Unfortunately I then caught him again so I've had take more practical action. 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.
All that glitters has a high refractive index.
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!
My business faces near ruin. CD sales have dropped through the floor. People aren't buying half as many CDs as they did just a year ago. Revenue is down and costs are up. My store has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.
I bought the store about 12 years ago. It was one of those boutique record stores that sell obscure, independent releases that no-one listens to, not even the people that buy them. I decided that to grow the business I'd need to aim for a different demographic, the family market. My store specialised in family music - stuff that the whole family could listen to. I don't sell sick stuff like Marilyn Manson or cop-killer rap, and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive Christian rock sections that I know of.
The business strategy worked. People flocked to my store, knowing that they (and their children) could safely purchase records without profanity or violent lyrics. Over the years I expanded the business and took on more clean-cut and friendly employees. It took hard work and long hours but I had achieved my dream - owning a profitable business that I had built with my own hands, from the ground up. But now, this dream is turning into a nightmare.
Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer CDs. Why is no one buying CDs? Are people not interested in music? Do people prefer to watch TV, see films, read books? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blame. The statistics speak for themselves - one in three discs world wide is a pirate. On The Internet, you can find and download hundreds of dollars worth of music in just minutes. It has the potential to destroy the music industry, from artists, to record companies to stores like my own. Before you point to the supposed "economic downturn", I'll note that the book store just across from my store is doing great business. Unlike CDs, it's harder to copy books over The Internet.
A week ago, an unpleasant experience with pirates gave me an idea. In my store, I overheard a teenage patron talking to his friend.
"Dude, I'm going to put this CD on the Internet right away."
"Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic], you'll get lots of respect."
I was fuming. So they were out to destroy the record industry from right under my nose? Fat chance. When they came to the counter to make their purchase, I grabbed the little shit by his shirt. "So...you're going to copy this to your friends over The Internet, punk?" I asked him in my best Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry voice.
"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.
"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my store - and don't come back." I barked. Cravenly, they complied and scampered off.
So that's my idea - a national blacklist of pirates. If somebody cannot obey the basic rules of society, then they should be excluded from society. If pirates want to steal from the music industry, then the music industry should exclude them. It's that simple. One strike, and you're out - no reputable record store will allow you to buy another CD. If the pirates can't buy the CDS to begin with, then they won't be able to copy them over The Internet, will they? It's no different to doctors blacklisting drug dealers from buying prescription medicine.
I have just written a letter to the RIAA outlining my proposal. Suing pirates one by one isn't going far enough. Not to mention pirates use the fact that they're being sued to unfairly portray themselves as victims. A national register of pirates would make the problem far easier to deal with. People would be encouraged to give the names of suspected pirates to a hotline, similar to TIPS. Once we know the size of the problem, the police and other law enforcement agencies will be forced to take piracy seriously. They have fought the War on Drugs with skill, so why not the War on Piracy?
This evening, my daught
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
Penn State Sucks
Hail to Pitt!
:)