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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.
haha
wesley
clark FIVE ten EARTH MAN EARTH MANnny man
tom.
clark. the man comes in.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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
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.
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?
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.
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
Very well-said if I may say so myself.
You've been warned.
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.
Penn State Sucks
Hail to Pitt!
:)
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
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.
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...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.
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
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.
-
- - 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...
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.
-
- - 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.)
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.
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.
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.)