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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?"
Given the availability of various stream ripping software (not sure if something is currently available for Napster particularly, didn't see any in a quick search) it would seem reasonable to expect that the Napster streams could become your real mp3s. Surely something could do the DirectSound dumping (as other programs already do) and then slap on the MP3 tags based on text grabbed from Napster's Windows handles.
Q
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Or simply will they "take orders" from outsiders???
Of course this won't help.
The university will not continue to purchase licenses once the "free donor" leaves. Other universities will not follow their lead.
It's pretty simply - eventually, we will all be tied to an IP adress the same way we're tied to a street address, a telephone number, a license plate, and a credit card number. We will "own" that IP address through the use of our login / password so that we can be tracked just as we are in every other aspect of life.
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.
Go walk around a college campus. Count the the people with iPods. OK, now tell me if this is really going to solve the 'problem.' They'd be better of getting a discount rate for students at the iTMS.
I can't be bothered to RTFA. What's a gwu?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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.
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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.
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What truth?
There is no dupe
I persume the students at GWU pay tution (as many US students do). Do they really want their money to go to a commercial company distributing music over the Internet? Shouldn't that money go into making their education the best that their money could buy?
I think that if GWU have a problem with illegal downloading of music they should use traffic shaping instead.
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i would not be suprised if this anonyous donor was napster itself, trying to set a precedent so other schools will subscribe. i can't help but think of the stripped down version of windows microsoft is peddeling in asia, or how they give out free copies of its operating system once a government decides to go open source.
But GWU officials are turning to the Napster service less as a means of wooing prospective students than as a way to tackle the technological and ethical crises posed by the downloading revolution
since when did this turn into a "crisis"? once again, the rhetoric is being rased by the same people who want to take away your right to back up music, share music, or make copies. the same people who illegally inflated the price of cd's, to which they were sued and lost. since they lost in the courthouse, they have been buying politicians in the congress. am i wrong? didn't they hire senator orin hatch's son?
Although the subscriptions will allow them to listen to as much music as they want for free through their computers, they will have to pay 99 cents for any song they copy onto a compact disc or portable music player
are you kidding me? can't people already buy music for 99 cents a song anywhere else? what are they paying for?
it looks like GWU got raped.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
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.
I go to Penn State, the first of the schools to strike a deal with Napster and bend over and let the RIAA take them up the...well, you know. Anywho, you get like, no songs. If you like -anything- other than what's on the radio, and sometimes even that, then your tracks will be marked "buy only" even with a Napster Premium account. Napster sucks. They claim to have 700k tracks...too bad I've had the service for half a year and only found 24 worth downloading.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
While some technically savvy students (read: /.ers) will continue to use other means to get DRM-free mp3's and movies, most college students would be content to listen to their favorite music off the Napster streaming service. Once the administration tells them it is okay and even probably helps them install the software the ease of use trumps everything else for the average college student.
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my school had a $1 charge per credit hour, that went to a scholarship fund for minority students. nobody bothered to ever ask about it. so i decided to ask, and the school said it went to black and hispanic students to pay their tuition. i had to work a job while in college. i told them i did not want to pay that fee, and they looked at me like i was a racist. why don't they not automatically charge those fees but ask if you are interested in contributing instead.
while i understand that collective buying by the entire student body can drastically lower prices of certain services, should students have a right to say if they want to be included? or is there some special payment made to school officials, some dirty agreements? i can't help but wonder as i walk down the halls of a college that only offers pepsi products in vending machines, at the cost of $1 a can, $1.35 for a plastic bottle? i guess they need the revenue to pay the administrators their $200,000 a year salary.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
...this seems to be almost exactly the same as the deals Napster has made with Penn State and the University of Rochester. As such, this story in and of itself doesn't really raise any truly new questions, it just proves that this Napster-university deal thing is likely to keep expanding.
And the reason is quite simple: universities are just covering their collective legal asses. It may not be the best way to do it (I go to UR and let the administration know that I felt a deal with iTunes would be superior, although even then I'd be skeptical that it would be used), but they're not doing this because they think it's really right or a good idea in and of itself. It's a simple cost/risk sort of calculation: the cost of this deal is like an insurance policy against the risk of lawsuits. Simple enough.
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...
How on earth does this contribute to the academic experience? Or are universities just turning into semi-adult daycare with toys and music and diversions to keep the MTV generation from having to actually THINK for a change?
Shoot me, shoot me NOW.
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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.
In my dorm, everybody put their music into iTunes and turned on sharing so we had some 70,000+ tracks available for streaming on the network. In that kind of environment, I don't think a paid streaming service like the one GWU plans on offering will be appreciated.
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In addition, I think a fair number of students use p2p applications to find songs they can't find elsewhere -- live cuts, unknown bands and other miscellaneous tracks they can't find anywhere else. The GWU officials may misunderstand the very demographic they try to serve.
Then there's the problem of alternative platforms. From the Napster website: "PC only, Windows XP/2000, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.1 or higher, Windows Media Player 7.1 or higher..." No thanks. I'll take my Powerbook and find music elsewhere.
Add to that the lack of ability to burn songs to CD and the ease of most p2p networks, as well as simply ripping CDs, and I think that GWU is burning its money.
Others have pointed to the availability of stream ripping software, and I suspect that such software will quickly become widespread and popular. I'm sure students, particularly the Comp Sci ones, will find ways around the system.
Streaming doesn't solve this problem, it just exacerbates it. Would you prefer a kid downloading 100 MP3s in 2 hours or streaming those MP3s for 5 hours?
Is this supposed to cover the university's ass? I don't see how. If they make the kids sign agreements not to use the connection to break laws, they've effectively absolved themselves from any liability. And without forcing kids into DRM-hell.
So what problem does this solve, exactly? The problem of finding money for pay increases.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
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.
Any technology that uses encryption to "manage" (read: remove) rights of the purchaser requires that the purchaser somewhere have the key in order to use the content provided.
This is the failing of DRM as a concept. Since the person you're trying to prevent from using content illegally needs to have the key in order to use the content legally, eventually someone's going to figure out how to get the key out and use it to extract the content so it can be used by the consumer in any way they see fit.
Software companies have been fighting "piracy" since the advent of the Apple II and Commodore 64 home computers - trying to do stupid stuff to fool software designed to copy diskettes into thinking the disk was bad. They've been fighting this battle for 20+ years, and the "problem" hasn't gone away.
Guess what, it isn't going to go away until content providers choose to sell content at prices that are reasonable by the consumer's standard. I'm perfectly willing to pay $15 for a game that has a week's worth of play time in it. I'm not willing to pay upwards of $60 for that same game. Similarly, when CDs first came out, the industry said they'd be cheaper than tapes because the cost of duplication was less. Guess what - the prices were fixed higher and so people started looking for ways to duplicate the discs.
When you let the market determine what's a fair price, theft goes down. That's a basic economic principle.
yeah, actually, i don't think stream ripping is illegal. Because when VCR's came out, they were worryed that it would used to break copyrights, but the supreme court said they were ok, so you can record whatever you want from TV or Radio, so i guess stream ripping is legal.
Was GWU one of the collages that had students that the RIAA sued?
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.
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. :)