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University Tests Legal File Downloading System
philospher writes "Dorm students at Northern Illinois University are testing a legal file downloading service. It is made by Ruckus Network, and was developed by a group of MIT students. NIU pays 5$ a month per student, and the students can get music, movies, TV shows, local content and community features. Sounds a lot better than having the RIAA sending you a court summons."
Force students to pay whether they want the Uni to sell their souls to the RIAA or not.
Nothing new here. Move along.
At least we're starting to see the Industry start using the technology to everyone's advantage instead of trying to quash it. Of course I'm in Canada and I'm pretty safe right now from the letters (mind you, I haven't downloaded an MP3 in a LONG time either). Of course with Morpheus's recent win in court, this sort of 'legal' P2P system may not catch on as well as hoped. Have to admit though, if I knew I could get high quality, legal MP3's I'd probably consider paying the $5/month.
$5/month is nothing compared to what they're going to be paying for the bandwidth used up by all of the downloading.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
These students can download or stream music, television and movies (presumably fairly recent releases in a VOD arrangement) for $5 a month? And I'm paying $70 a month for my DSS service which has nothing on demand? And it's legal?
This begs a few observations:
There is no way this service will make it into the real world at this price.
or
This service is not legal.
or
My rectum problems are NOT due to a lack of fiber in my diet.
No offense, but WTF does that mean? Made and developed are essentially synonyms in this case. I often wonder why so many poorly worded submissions make it to the front page of Slashdot. Is it because putting anything in quotes seems to remove all responsibility from the editor? Or is it sheer ignorance. I understand that the English language is a nasty, irregular bastard of a language, but for the love of corn let's try to be professional. And if I see one more "Microsoft are developing" or "Google have updated" or any other such nonsense I'm going to have to beat the living shit out of an ignorant bastard. An entity, even if it is comprised of many individuals, should be treated as singular because it is. I'll stop with the common sense lesson, but if you want people to honestly pay attention to what's important, don't let your poor writing get in the way. Believe me, it's a distraction, and for even more close-minded individuals than myself it can be a complete turn-off. Thanks for your attention.
I am feeling fat and sassy
I find it funny that the Ruckus Network's homepage boasts that it "puts an end to Internet bandwidth problems." I don't understand how encouraging students to download files can put an end to bandwidth problems...
The most popular downloads, which also account for the greatest bandwith used, are things like the latest DVD movies, theatre camera captures, popular albums. That's a simple fact, whether it's legal or not.
I can't believe Ruckus or any other small media company is ever going to be able to offer these kinds of downloads on their networks. I mean, is WB going to make a deal with them so that they can distribute movies at $5/month right at the same time as those movies are released in theatres?
So then, what kind of content *can* they distribute? Movies that came out two years ago, or Britney Spears' very first album, I guess. The same stuff that's on free to air TV.
In that case, there is still going to be alternative "illegal" networks for sharing the latest popular media, and I suspect that the illegal networks will stay much more popular.
It very well could help. If enought people switched to downloading things from Kazaa to this in-house network, it would actually probably substantially lighten the load where it counts: the connection from the on campus network to the rest of the world.
(It sounds like this will just be within the university.)
In campus network is much, much, much cheaper than the backbone out to the Internet. (For example, CMU has gigabit. So downloading within the campus would be almost free.) You increase the total exchange, but decrease the volume of transfer at the bottleneck.
With a total undergraduate population of 15,800, you can rest assured that the final tally will come to less than $2.4 million. But that's not the point.
The point is, this has nothing to do with academia. This service won't help you get your Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. It won't help you at all. It reminds me of that futurama episode where they go to Mars University:
Would you send your kid to that college? Would you want to go to that college? Maybe.
Synergy is your friend
This download network, like many other legal, commercial networks that have struck deals with colleges, is paid for by the university, not by the students themselves. I never really understood this. I mean, I know most schools feel that it is in some way their responsibility to pay for their students entertainment, i.e. concerts and other performances, fairs, etc., but this seems like going a little over the edge. I mean, NIU has 25,000 students, so if they were to pay for this program for all of their students it would be 25,000 students times $5 times let's say 8 months of school (plus whatever they pay for the kids that are there in the summer) or $1,000,000. That's a lot of money to add onto whatever they budget for student entertainment functions.
File downloading services are not, in and of themselves, legal or illegal. They simply exist. What makes file downloading systems legal or illegal is what people do with them.
Much like Grokster and Kazaa were recently ruled to not violate the law, FTP, HTTP, Samba, AppleTalk, and other file transfer technologies are perfectly legal.
The title would be better stated as "University tests new copyright management system". That's what this system really is, an RIAA sanctioned music distribution system wrapped in DRM.
This is the problem with the current debate. It seems that "file downloading" has become "illegal" in general because of the political campaigns by the RIAA/MPAA to change the way we think. This is more than a little wrong. Just because the *AAs say it is wrong or illegal, does not make it so. These are the same people who claimed that Spiderman [I] did not make any money so they would not have to pay Stan Lee.
All file sharing systems, yes, including P2P, are capable of and indeed to share lots of legal files every day. There is no "system" for legal downloads. All systems can carry legal downloads.
This is a system for controlled sales of *AAs products. Warning. Lanugage, when used in the wrong way, can be hazardous to your freedom.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
If you don't pay mafia protection fees, then "bad things happen to you".
If you don't pay the RIAA for its monthly fee or buy it's content, then the only things that could happen to you (such as not listening to Britney Spears) are good.
If you're referring to the court cases brought against people who were file-sharing and infringing on copyrights, then I don't think a monthly college file sharing fee protects you if you continue to file-share copyrighted works that aren't part of the deal. It's safe to assume if you pay a $5 a month college file-sharing fee, then rip your copy of Lord of the Rings and put it up on eMule, you can very well still find yourself in court.
Stop with the knee jerk quip karma bait comments.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
Despite the standover tactics (and I agree they're mafia-esque), they offer a product. The grandparent post values being able to gain access to the content at $5 a month, who the hell are you to say he shouldn't get access to it?
What happens if grandparent poster likes Britney Spears? Who are you to say it's good for him not to get access to it?
And if he feels the moral obligation to pay for access, and feels $5/all you can eat content is fair, then let him pay.
It will depend on what's made available. I don't think $5 a month is unreasonable, and from what the article says it seems a lot of students agree with that point of view.
ha! That's rich coming from the guy who posted about how the RIAA is the root of all evil when someone said they might be interested in the service mentioned!
-- james
Why "tethered"? If I pay for a movie or music CD at a bricks-and-mortar store, I don't get it "tethered". I'm reminded of the Mark Twain quote when he was told that he could borrow a friend's books, but only read them in his library: "Sure, you can borrow my lawnmower, but for security reasons I cannot allow it to be used outside my lawn."
If a system like this was ever supported by the MPAA/RIAA does anyone really think $5 a month would be the going rate here in the USA? More like $5 a song. The theft will never stop until the RIAA/MPAA stop alienating their customers. An amazingly large percentage of this country would actually tell you that the RIAA/MPAA are getting exactly what they deserve. The same group would then tell you that it's wrong to steal a candy bar. It has nothing to do with a misunderstanding or dis-association due to the internet. It has to do with people legitimizing the theft because they are angry and they know they have no other recourse in this country. File sharing has become a grass roots campaign to punish the music industry.
Regards,
~Joshua Norton
Mafia?
Don't stir the pot.
Talk about bad analogies.
It might be even semi useable if people were, oh, say, stealing from the mafia or bootlegging mafia ice capades shows, and the mafia rolled out a nationwide $5/month "extended service plan," but they're not.
It's not paying a protection fee. The RIAA isnt going to swoop down on you for not doing anything wrong. Maybe once in a while, but I bet you there are more "oops" mob hits than there are "oops" RIAA hits.
Not to stick up for the RIAA, but this licensing is not bad at all. It's better than you'll get with sites like Rhapsody or anywhere else - cheapest Ive seen is ten bucks and I'll tell you, for the subscription rate, you don't get a lot - most artists (and almost _all_ "charting" artists) don't license their stuff for streaming - only purchase.
for providing them with a wonderfully decentralized, efficient distribution system that allows them to make there music better known to a broader public without having to invest in costly bandwidth.
If they'd only have a brain amongst them....
Maybe I just don't "get" it. But I thought we send kids to college to learn stuff, not to download music and videos. If that's all they are going to do, they can stay home and work at 7-eleven and start paying rent.
If you're going to be in college/uni soon I would highly recommend that you don't view it as an opportunity to get laid, a way to hone your counterstrike skills, or a chance to vastly improve your music and dvd collection.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Well you can't get around that. The point is that they have access to the service. Whether they use it or not is their choice.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
Hmm, yes, sounds like a good idea. Keeps you from getting in trouble. But that does not mean that it is a good thing, really...it fails to fix the problem we have, the problem that you CAN get in trouble for things that are not wrong. Don't get me wrong; downloading a copy of, say, Collateral without paying for it, having any intention of paying for it, for the sole reason that you do not want to pay for it, is wrong. But there is that pesky thing called fair use. Not everything students do on these networks is wrong.
Students can request any song in the 700,000 song library (or whatever the current downloadable music library size is) and if it isn't already on their on-campus server, the server will go get it elsewhere and store it for future downloads. The students can take as much music as they want, but they will NOT NOT NOT be able to transfer these off their computer by any means: mp3 player, burning to CD/DVD.
Let me say that again. They will NOT be able to copy, burn, transfer these files by any means. If they want to do this, they pay the $0.99 per song going rate to get the song in Windows Media format. From that point on, they can copy that song because they own it, and it will come with all the trappings of Windows Media DRM.
Every college campus gets a custom Ruckus website, where students can publish their playlists, and if you like it, you can then download the playlist from the Ruckus server.
Insofar as movies, the reason you can't get movies newer than 4 years old is because of all the deals in place with video rental places, movie theaters, HBO, etc. But, they point out a large segment for demand are cult classics which would be available for download.
I've met with Company management, and this is all from their presentation.
-evilplushtoy
Actually, it doesn't much matter whether you are distributing content or not: They sue lots of people without any credible pretext. I got a letter from my cable provider at the instigation of the BSA, for example, claiming that I was sharing Delphi 7 on eDonkey. This is fundamentally absurd, as I have never run eDonkey,
nor have I ever had a copy of Delphi 7. But they could cut off my Internet connection and put me out of work without so much as a by-your-leave, and my only recourse would be to spend more money than I make in a year to get a lawyer in order to get a whisper of a hint of a chance of convincing some bought-and-paid-for judge to force my cable company to provide service to me, laws saying that they don't have to do so notwithstanding.
Yeah, my whole family has to live in fear of RIAA/MPAA/BSA barratry because our legal system is corrupt. It sucks. That's why I support assassination politics, the only meaningful form of democracy that's left.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
The same kind of thing happens in society, but it's especially true in a university setting. You are getting access to amazing stuff because of the economy of scale of the students that are there. You get to use science and electronics lab equipment that you could never hope to afford. You get to use expensive software packages--autocad and such--that you could not get, gym and fitness facilities, high speed internet, etc., etc. Plus if you act now, you'll also get this great education that will help you get a job! And here's the best part: it's not like taxes where you have to pay it. If you don't like the service package of a university, DON'T GO. Or if you prefer, go to a smaller college or community college that is cheaper and has less features. Would you whine and cry about some place that sells a $15,000 computer that's packed with features you would never use? Instead, choose the one that has the things you do want at a reasonable price.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds