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Napster Strikes Deal With GWU
ParticleMan911 writes "In an attempt to thwart illegal music downloads, GWU has struck a deal with Napster to allow every student living on campus a free subscription to Napster's streaming audio service. Every one of the 700,000 songs on Napster will be available to stream on each students' computer. GWU is not disclosing how much the streaming service, available to all users at $9.95/Month, is costing them, but the first year trial of the service has been donated by an anonymous donor. Will this method help get rid of illegal music downloads, or simply be a handy tool to use while your real mp3s are downloading?"
Napster uses DRM'd .WMV files. If it wasn't for that I probably would subscribe to their service. And I'd be pissed if I went to school there. I'm already tired of all these fees I'm paying at my school, like parking fees when I don't drive, athletic fees when I don't play any sports here, etc etc... now an MP3 fee? bah.
--I don't want the world, I just want your half.
This will have no affect on the massive amounts of Divx movies and warezd Software. After living "on campus" in the dorms for three years now, I'm pretty sure that movies and warez are a way bigger bandwith issue than mp3s. Albums are small and quick to download in 20 mins. Movies and software (games especially), on the otherhand, are often gigs and gigs of data to have to pull down and can take hours. This will help very little in the long run.
Caffeine Good
Hear all the music while you're enrolled... then lose access to everything you downloaded unless you pay full rate when you leave.
If I was going to donate something to an institute of education a music downloading service would not be it.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Is this high-bitrate, CD-quality audio that will be streaming? If not, then this scheme will have limited effect, particularly among the non-Britney listener crowd. Besides, unless the university has Napster servers onsite or something, or maybe uses bandwidth shaping to give the Napster streams the highest priority, with people downloading other stuff all the time, the stream will probably be interrupted from time to time. To me, and to others too I'm sure, there is nothing more annoying than a stream that breaks up...even if it's only once every 10 songs.
Also, what about those who'd prefer to use their own "system" to listen to their music? This covers the gamut from those using alternative OS's to those who simply prefer a particular player (Winamp, Foobar2000, etc.). If this is a Windows-only, WMP/Proprietary Player-only scheme, it definitely isn't going to be all that popular.
Lastly, what about portables? Can you put one copy of a song on a portable of your choice?
There's too many imponderables with this scheme, and if it's typically restricted streaming (which I think it'll be, with Napster the source), then the best this thing can hope to be is a very fast preview for songs that people will want to buy/download.
senator hatch is the one who sponsered the legislation to take away everyones rights to share music. hiring his son is a valid critisism. there is a conflict of interest. we don't let senators work for lobbying firms when they leave congress for the first few years, so why would we let their children work as lobbyists. seems unethical. who would be a greater influance in how a senator votes? a former senator selling them on some legislation, or their own children who's salary depends on what their father does?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
He never said he was a pirate. It's people like you that think security through obscurity is a sound policy.
But what happens after the introductory period? I remember another university that tried to have students pay a mandatory "MP3 Fee" with their tuition for access to Napster because they figured that they'd download music anyway. Needless to say, that wasn't very popular with the students there. I hope GWU doesn't follow suit.
In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
Oh wait...
Yeah, I go to the University of Rochester also, and the only reason they, and Penn State even struck these deals is because UR's Provost, Charles Phelps, and PSU's president, both serve on the Technology Task Force of the Joint Committee along with members of the MPAA and RIAA. Oddly enough, Dave Lambert, Vice President & CIO of Georgetown University, is also on this committee (see link).
:-)
The Napster offering is lame, the students cannot use it from home, nor can they play the teathered tracks without being connected to the network and logged into Napster. The streaming quality of 96kbps is pathetic, and most new albums and additions are buy-only, making the service almost completely useless. I'd rather listen to internet radio at a higher bitrate. As far as limmited network traffic, it probably does work, because those people who would use Kazaa anyway would maybe like it, and since each school then buys a RAID array Napster Server to host the service on-site, less people will be wasting my bandwidth
where commercial companies come into schools and market their products directly to children, is there anywhere left in America free of sales pitches ?
kids should be suing companies for exploiting minors, still i guess as far as control is concerned better to have a society uninformed than informed, who else is gonna fight rich peoples arguments in Iraq/Iran et al
lemmings come to mind
And I went to the engineering school too (CompSci.) Sad to see they went with Napster instead of, say, iTunes or something better. The engineering school knew better, looks like they never consulted them though. Streaming audio? Ugh...
Is it me or did this come out of nowhere?
I guess donating money really has influence (no, it wasn't me who did it).
Then again, GW has done this before. They aligned Pepsi, can't find a single Coke on campus, have to go to the nearby Watergate or even further to get one. They also put fridges and microwaves in every freshmen room, and you had to ask to remove it or they'd automatically charge you. Not sure if they still do that, it's been 5 years or so since I was there.
The network on campus was quite good, they even had fiber optic installed in most dorms. So, I don't doubt the sharing of files in campus is quite rampant, and it will no doubt continue.
If I were a student at GWU, I'd be furious at the administration.
It's not the college's job to enforce the law. They don't have to follow me when I walk into a store to make sure I don't shoplift. They don't have to monitor my financial transactions (even if I make them on a university computer) to ensure I don't commit securities fraud. And they certainly don't need to spend MY TUITION DOLLARS so that I don't infringe on some corporation's copyrights.
Add into the mix that they're spending my money on proprietary formats with proprietary DRM, supporting companies and causes I universally revile, and I'd frankly prefer they spent the money dumping feces in the center of campus.
Oh -- and a college education is DAMN EXPENSIVE these days. We're talking $40,000 every year. For four years, that's $160,000. And it's increasing steadily by about 5% per year. College tuition absolutely drains all but the very wealthy. It's only barely tolerable when you can convince yourself that that money is being spent on education. But the idea of spending my family's sweat, blood, and tears on nothing more than MAKING COPYRIGHT BARONS HAPPY is just insane. I'd be furious.
Law Schools?
;)
A law student recently told me that when testing for the bar, one of the more popular questions to test your ethics is to ask if you've ever downloaded music illegally. If you say yes, you're cooked. Since GWU is in DC I'm going to take a wild guess and say they have a law school. If that law students story really was true, this could keep every half intelligent law student from perjuring themselves as their first act of BECOMING a lawyer
This is the same thing that Cflix is offering. Only, it leverages the gigabit networks installed on most campuses. They use a Linux box located on site to provide video-on-demand, music-on-demand, music downloads, campus video libaries, and student films.
The advantage of the Cflix service is that popular movies/tracks don't eat up expensive internet bandwidth and are stored on-site.
One other advantage to the Cflix service is that it can be seen as a teaching aid (with the online campus library) instead of a purely entertainment oriented solution.
I don't really see the advantage of Napster/iTunes over the Cflix service...besides brand recognition.
All they need to do is to get enough people to install DRM'd computer systems and they can get a good deal of control; if they can get that, then they can pretty much p0wn the computer industry slowly but surely.
Problem is, that right now, I'm typeing from my first linux install (mandrake 10.0), and after taking a good look around it, even being a n00bie, I rather like it; it was easier and faster to install than windows (the windows CD-Key makes it more difficult to install, heh) and it all works outta the box (that's partially due to good hardware planning on my part). Infact, a few more stable versions, a better driver library, and mabye a few more user-oriented applications and automations and my educating myself, and I think it may be ready to give to my parents (of course, they get no root). Point is, there's something better out there already, and people are already moving onto platforms the RIAA/MPAA won't neccissarily be able to lock down as easily as they can windows.
Point here is, there's already vaible alternatives to the RIAA/MPAA's produces in circulation. As p2p services get more popular and search services for smaller bands are introduced, the RIAA will become a big, expensive pile of crap and 2 different cultures will arise; the dwindeling one that fallows the RIAA via traditional media sources, and the one that fallows internet music.
They aren't afraid of their music being pirated half as much as they are afraid of loosing market dominance through their monopoly.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
I'm a current GW student and I can't believe that the administration, constantly bitching about how strapped for cash they are despite the $40,000 a year tuition, have decided to even bother with this. Hell, the administration was going to cut the free newspaper (NYT, WaPO, WaTimes) program because of it's costs. In summary, the administration is retarded. If I can, I'll have this taken off my tuition if I'm billed for it. Besides, the GWU Newsgroup feed is far better than Kazaa and takes up less bandwith. :)