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.
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
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"
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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"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.
Shh.. Don't tell anyone. Requested streams without the DJ blather.. Line out - Line in VS $1.00 a song that has to be burned on a CD but not saved to hard drive to keep. Watch for these to appear on the local sneaker net as MP3's on CD and DVD's. Don't expect them to anounce this on or off campus. Someone will figure out how to take the freebie music (well included with tuition) with them. Many will reason it's paid for. It's mine. I'll take it with me.
The truth shall set you free!
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?
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.