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Dell and Napster Going Directly to Colleges
An Anonymous Reader writes "Forbes is reporting on the teaming of Dell and Napster to provide music directly to college campuses. The solution will alleviate network bottlenecks caused by illegal music downloads will enable colleges to use Dell blade servers on campus to store music from Napster's library locally. This will allow network processing speed to remain fast while hundreds of students simultaneously download digital music." From the article: "Campuses were 'shrinking the [available] bandwidth on the network to discourage' illegal downloading, says John Mullen, vice president of Dell's higher education business. He says schools want a way to minimize the impact of music downloads on their networks and encourage students to shift toward legal downloads."
I build my own computers and I use my own MP3 players. I don't need the new sell-out Napster to impose so-called "Digital Rights Management" to tell me how I can listen to the music I like.
Can you play Napster WMAs on an iPod? No. On my old IRiver with hacked firmware? No. On my CD-MP3 player that works fantastically? No.
I download my MP3s legally. I don't need a college administrator to impinge upon those rights.
"He says schools want a way to minimize the impact of music downloads on their networks and encourage students to shift toward legal downloads."
It just takes one student sys admin with access to the whole freaking library, and there you have it, piracy at it's best.
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
Almost everyone has their base music collection built by now, they would just be adding songs here and there. This won't help bandwidth issues, the big culprit is movie and tv downloads. I would just laugh a rep that came and talked to me about their service.
The solution will alleviate network bottlenecks caused by illegal music downloads...
Funny, I thought that uploading (sharing) copyrighted music files was the illegal part.
In my experience, although "music downloads" sap up a lot of bandwidth on campus networks, I would have to say that more and more the problem is becoming worm/virus/zombie-infested computers coming in from a summer of broadband connections.
A bandwidth shaper can more-or-less block or slow down "music downloading", but a virus spreading on the network is much harder to contain.
You might get a visit from Steve, who might say:
"Dude, You're gettin' a Cell!"
I wonder which is worse anyway, downloading music, or Smoking pot. Good job, Steve!
And they said zombies weren't real!
So... what about people who like good music?
-FL
"The solution will alleviate network bottlenecks caused by illegal music downloads..."
So by offering a pay service to students who have the capability already to pay, but choose rather to download illegally will alleviate the problem? I think a better solution to the problem is to offer a more reasonable rate per song or per bandwidth utilized for music downloads... Lets say $.10 a song. I would download music for that price on a massive scale.
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
The push to promote "legal music downloads" on college campuses is only going to come back and bite these schools in the rear. Once they start taking it upon themselves to monitor network usage and to some small extent regulate it as well, they forego their Common Carrier status and put themselves at risk of being held liable when the student users behave badly.
By not restricting the network, they can always claim ignorance and place all the responsibility on the students themselves. The students are the ones breaking or obeying the law, and it is they who ought to be responsible for their actions. The school, by becoming a sort of network nanny, takes an amount of responsibility and can be held responsible because of that.
I think that the schools should either get out of the internet provider service altogether or just let the kids do what they want to do. Trying to ride both sides of the fence is just going to lead to headaches down the road.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
True story.
I used to be a resident advisor at UAH. One morning I woke up and tried to log on to Everquest. No workie. That's OK I thought, maybe an unscheduled patch... so I went to check some other stuff. It didn't work. AIM didn't work. This is all sounding a little fishy so I check my voicemail and sure enough, a bunch of my friends note that every game, filesharing and otherwise service is down, with exception of POP3 email and WWW. Couldn't even IMAP or FTP off-campus.
I brought this to the attention to the housing director, who knew nothing of any plans to alter the network. I knew one of the higher-ups in the network ladder, I talked to him but he was out of the loop. He set up a meeting with the appropriate people. I got there, along with the head of the housing department. Remember, we were represening a bunch of very pissed off college kids living on-campus. The guy blew us off, saying "school is about education" and "If my daughter lived on campus I wouldn't want her playing video games and downloading music." I countered by saying some of us come from thousands of miles away, and this is home, and we need to relax on the weekends when we aren't studying.
Long story short, we ran a petition drive, appealed to the president of the university, and after a few weeks of hard work and lobbying got ports back on a case-by-case basis, but they put in a load-balancing system and metered the filesharing ports to the point of being unusable.
From talking with colleagues from other schools, this seems to be a typical mindset of a University administrator. Good luck, Dell. It sounds like a good idea, but I think it will be a hard sale to make.
-everphilski-
First off, any service that you have to pay for is not going to stop illegal downloading; I think that has already been established, though.
Secondly, having a server on campus with Napster's complete music library seems like it would be a hacker's dream come true.
Not sure this one is going to work out.
Two dupes in a row? Is Zonk doing it on purpose now?
is plain stupid. Who needs access to the outside world to download illegal mp3s when... on a student's campus. Seriously, if these folks have their personal computers on an intranet, nothing preents them to do massive file sharing through ftp servers and the like.
\u262D = \u5350
And the way it saved bandwidth (obvious) was by using a local caching server.
I thought the network bottlenecks were caused by illegal video downloads? Music is just a drop in the bucket these days.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Is this going to be a comprehensive selection of music that includes Clawfinger and Rammstein, or is this gloing to be limited to top 10,000 songs on American radio? Personally, I live at my own house rather than on campus so that I can have my own cable Internet connection that does what I want, not what the university wants, minus of course Adelphia's terms of service agreement. So for now, my FreeBSD server can host mp3's to computers on my LAN over NFS, but I can't let my mail server or Apache have their ports forwarded to the OpenBSD router, because Adelphia blocks ports. I think universities should allow each user to have their own Internet access (maybe an independent ISP for dorm rooms via wireless?) so we can do what we want. Universities shouldn't have to deal with Internet access, and idiots that run unpatched Windows XP SP1 machines directly off the network and eat bandwidth.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
This is a pretty good idea... which is why I hope that Apple isn't too proud to copy it. I'm sure that the Apple/iPod/iTMS combo would provide a much more slick, and efficient implementation of this kind of system. They would probably even implement features showing you what was currently most popular on campus, letting you "be hip" with a minimum of effort (and this would also make the servers more efficient, since most people would download already cached content).
I'm less excited about a Dell+Napster interface. But that's just me! (and I'm not even a Mac zealot!)
They could easily make it work by rolling it into the semester's fees. Most colleges have a semester "Lab Fee" to cover comptuer labs on campus. Adding a few bucks to the lab fee wouldn't be that noticeable (they add a few bucks every year anyways, it seems). And then it would be "free" per see.
And when you complain that it's "not really free" you have to realise there is so much crap you pay for as a college student that you probably don't even use it's not even funny... the fitness center, the library, the student newspaper, all the events student government sponsors, the free condoms, any event that is subsidized (concerts, etc), comes out of your tuition. Like it or not. Adding a few bucks a month is nothing in comparison.
-everphilski-
"Hardware vendor sells file cache" is hardly a big deal.
My Journal
From the article:
Mullen says that increasing Dell's market share in portable music players isn't the point of the project. He stressed Dell's position as the leading provider of technology to higher education and said the company is simply giving its customers what they want.
Somehow, I find this to be highly unlikely. Apple has the majority of the market share with the ipod. Add in the fact that Napster wants to cut into itunes share in the "legal music download" market.
If they truly want to give their customers what they want, they'd lower pricing on the music download. There's no real motivation to pay existing prices for a digital only (meaning no media included) copy of music. Throw in restricted rights on said music and it's not a sensible purchase for most users.
Dell went directly to AMD and got some decent processors.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Why is it assumed that college students (or high-school, or middle-school) need to have hot-and-cold running music, enough that colleges should be persuaded to provide special accomodation for it? I can't be the only one to find a retail music pipe (financially benefitting the music industry, and I'm sure the schools, too) a bit removed from the schools' likely missions. How about a chocolate pipe, too? College kids like chocolate! And how about a pneumatic tube stuffed with clothing from the Gap flowing through each dorm? Grab a T-shirt you like (and if you don't like any, just get some because "that's what college students are supposed to be, like, doing these days"), and it'll be debited to your campus-cash card linked to your ID.
Nothing wrong with getting music online: there are lots of free offerings, and quite a few music-for-money sites with various pros and cons. And when colleges provide both housing and networking it doesn't make sense to have them locked down to academic-only use (more work than letting it be open, and hoping that it sometimes and somewhat benefits enough people either academically or as a creature comfort to be worth having it in the first place), but shouldn't it pretty much end there?
I don't like to think of music (inspired creative effort made manifest in a series of notes and words, expressing and eliciting a range of emotional states, divine / sublime) as the equivalent of those perpetually-on sodium-discharge lights, a commodity background prop that's simply expected to be everywhere you look (or listen).
Apple (and others) have shown that it's perfectly possible to sell music piecemiel online; great! What sense does it make for a college administration to tie themselves to one vendor of a product that doesn't even have anything to do with the reason that college exists? Why not just say "OK, you've got an Internet connection to every dorm room; how you use it isn't worth micromanaging, but please only do legal things."
Only semi-cynical, I think it has to be because colleges want to make money, and aren't always as particular as they could be about how they go about it.
Rant, rant, rant.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I have two words for you : KaZaa WinMX BitTorrent. Ooh that was three!
Anything that prevents that sort of knee-jerk idiocy from happening again is okay in my book. I still think there are better options, though. I can see it becoming a big DRM nuisance really easily.
It looks like this could be competition for Ruckus Network, which provides a file-sharing service to [some] universities and colleges.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
...just try implementing it with no-bugs and no round-about way in. The solution will alleviate network bottlenecks caused by illegal music downloads will enable colleges to use Dell blade servers on campus to store music from Napster's library locally. This will allow network processing speed to remain fast while hundreds of students simultaneously download digital music.
Hmmm? Looks like the schools will be paying to maintain the hard drives themselves (since it doesn't clearly specify who's paying for the servers) and are only really offered the service to host Napster's collection. The solution looks good for Dell and Napster, they can profit off of the school hosting the files for them just using internal network bandwidth. How exactly does this save bandwidth (maybe on the internet but internally bandwidth is still used)?!
A download is still a download, it's just that in this case the download comes from within the network instead of outside the network -- bandwidth is still used.
He says schools want a way to minimize the impact of music downloads on their networks and encourage students to shift toward legal downloads.
Until some student hacks into the system and spreads the leak to their friends and instead of downloading through the internet they'd get it from the internal network -- internal P2P! I suppose in this case the students could claim the downloads were 'legal' even if they used a hack to access them.
Dell and Napster are signing themselves up for a lot of work here, seems very similar to gambling to me, because they have their reputation on the line but on the other side of the coin...profit!
It's a nice idea but it suffers from a common implementation flaw (like attempts at forcing the CD to be inserted to run an application), if there's a legitimate way in someone will sniff it enough to make their own way in to the data.
these blade servers get stolen? Servers full of music might make tempting targets to "pirates." Anyone for night-ops in the basement of the tech building?
Anything they can do to limit student liability is a plus in their book. Witness this email from MIT's Undergraduate Association vice president:
--------
Maybe seven weeks ago, a couple of guys from a company called Ruckus Network came to MIT to demo their product for a few people - myself and a couple of administrative types. You can see Ruckus' website at www.ruckusnetwork.com. Basically, this is a sort of legal filesharing network, signed on to by
universities, where you can get some stuff for free and pay a fee to get other stuff. The Institvte administration is looking into it in response to the RIAA lawsuits against MIT students from a while back (on a related note, according to my admin sources the RIAA claims to know of many others who could be sued at MIT and has implied that they're not going to stop - but they have gone easier on schools that are "trying to fix the problem" by putting things like Ruckus in place). MIT does not have to pay anything, it just has to allow Ruckus to market and set up on its campus.
Some of the advantages are that students can display their own movies, music, essays, artwork, whatever, and the extremely quick downloading speed for
movies. They have a certain selection of movies and music available each month, changing periodically, and you can download their whole selection for a given time period if you want. And it's all sorts of media, not just movies and music - articles, essays, photographs, etc. You can connect with other people; it's sort of like someone combined a filesharing program and the Facebook.
There are also some major drawbacks. First of all, Ruckus is only supported on Windows. No Mac OS, no Linux. Why? Because it uses DRM (Digital Rights
Management) technology. I've sent them an email asking them what kind, and some questions about it, but as I only sent it a short time ago they haven't
responded yet. I admit to not being terribly familiar with DRM, but some of my friends whom I talked to initally were sketched out by it. Also, you only get to keep the files you download as long as you're connected to Ruckus Network.
I sent the reps from Ruckus an email asking them some questions. Here's the responses I got:
Q. Does the Windows-only constraint apply to everything on RUCKUS or just the things that customers have to pay for?
A. The Windows-only constraint only applies to the music and movies that students choose to pay for. It does not apply to:
Ruckus Studio
Student submitted audio and video posted for playback and review
Ruckus News
Student submitted links in relevant topics are updated hourly
Ruckus Community/Social Networking
Connect with friends through profiles and images
Ruckus Campus Radio
Ad supported radio featuring top 200 songs played throughout network
Campus Boards
Ride Boards, Event boards, Buy/sell boards, "Missed chances" boards
Therefore no student or MIT is paying for something that they can not use.
Q. What kinds of DRM techniques are used?
A. The paid content mentioned above utilizes Windows Media DRM (so WMA's and WMV's)
Q. Do the DRM and constraints apply to student-created music and movies?
A. Student created music can be posted as MP3's, WMA, Quicktime, WAV. The student posting the content chooses the format. Student created video can
be posted as WMV or Quicktime- again at the discretion of the student who posted it.
Q. Is there a plan to expand RUCKUS to Linux, or will that never happen? Is there a time frame for expanding it to Mac OS?
A. We are working to expand the content to MAC and Linux but no timetable exists. The decision rests in the hands of the entertainment companies that
license us content. They must approve a DRM that works for these formats. They are hesitant to do this.
Q. Are downloaded movies in QuickTime? Windows Media Player? Something else?
A. Paid downloaded movies are WMV's.
God, my freshman year at WVU we had awesome bandwidth. You could play all the online games you wanted, download whole movies and albums in like 30 minutes, the works.
Sophomore year, not so good. Freaking bandwidth caps. It made it impossible to search on google let alone download anything. Now, you're lucky if you get 1500 ping to a server down the street and music downloading is unbearable.
But I have an apartment. And a broadband cable account. So poo to WVU and the bandwidth capping. Bastards.
Forbes is reporting on the teaming of the RIAA and the Yakuza to go directly to college campuses and start slapping people around.
Questions to ask before you sign up:
What is the bitrate of the mp3 files?
How big is the catalog?
Can you copy these files after they have been downloaded?
Can you do unlimited transfers and shares of these files and playlists with others?
Is the downloading unlimited?
Can Dell Blade servers handle the traffic?
Can we find any way Apple and Microsoft can profit from this service, even if they have nothing to do with it?
Will grades suffer? Does anyone care?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
As a college student, it goes without saying that I am against any increases in tuition...and guess what Dell 'helping out college campuses' would do to it of course. They are a pay-for service, and the college/university would have to pay for it somewhere.
:
I really appreciate the effort, but living off Top Ramen is hard enough. 'Giving' us this service just like they gave all Duke incoming freshmen iPods is really just passing the bill onto the students.
--
Check out the Uncyclopedia.org
The only wiki source for politically incorrect non-information about things like Kitten Huffing and Pong! the Movie !
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
This new services has nothing to do with the old napster except the name and the universities would be hurting themselves by allowing this sort of encroachment.
Can you play Napster on a platform other than DRM'd versions of MS-Windows? No. And when DRM is installed, it affects the whole machine, not just the music player. That's another two strikes against the idea.Then there's the WMA format itself. Many universities are funded at least in part by federal and state money. As such they should not be party to helping a recidivist company illegally leverage it's desktop monopoly to break into new markets, even by proxies like Dell and Napster. WMA is part of the core of major anti-trust legal trouble in Europe already. Don't drag the universities into that mess.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
schools want a way to minimize the impact of music downloads on their networks and encourage students to shift toward legal downloads
Uhmmm yhea. What about all the warez iso's, dvd rips of movies, dvd images, and porn that kids are gonna download and share with each other?? They are just as likely a bandwidth hog than any music downloading.
Google has had the Google appliance for years now. These things save tons of bandwidth by hosting the entire Internet locally. :-)
I couldn't resist. A friend of mine worked at a place that was looking into the Google appliance.The PHB was totally disinterested after learning that the device wasn't for caching the Internet.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
"So, Mr. School Admin, why is it that you're going with this service that won't work on 90% of the students' music players, and can't even be burnt to CD?"
- 23 )
"Well, Dell is a, uh, leading provider of technology to education, but mostly we've just always enjoyed big sacks full of money."
(should probably credit: http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php?date=2000-10
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Sure, now the kids can download legal music from campus. This does not solve the problem. It was stated earlier in the article that they were doing this in an effort to curb music piracy. They had the ablilty to d/l legit music before. I expect the piracy to continue at the same rate as before.
Tufts has this service CDIGIX http://www.cdigix.com/website/cdigix/
Kinda like this napster thing for the campus, basically Tufts is paying for the right to lease the music during the school year. At the end of the year, the music becomes unplayable. Can't really comment on how good it is thought as i was abroad last year (the first year Tufts had it)
The article doesn't make any mention of the cost to the schools or more importantly the students. I'm sure that any school that implements this farce will end up further burdening the students. Having worked as a net admin for a college residential network it is safe to say that this is NOT going to help the overall bandwidth problems on campus networks. The only bottleneck that will be somewhat eased will be the outside connection to the internet. Just think of all the students that will be banging away at that blade trying to access the cache of mp3 through legit purchases or more likely those trying to hack it like many will do. Just wait till this starts to catch on and the **AA will get wind and start mandating through government lackeys that students should be charged an additonal "technology fee" which goes right to the **AA. Afterall this is America, bought and paid for by the special interest groups and guilty until proven innocent.
Dear Dean, I am writing from Dell corporation to offer you an exciting business proposal. If you give us lots of money, we'll give you some servers. If you give us even more money, we'll allow you to fill those servers with music from Napster, which serves no educational purpose whatsoever! How can you go wrong with a deal like this? You give us money, we give you worthless crap. The real beauty of this plan is that not only do you get worthless crap, you can use it to displace some of that pesky "educational material" and research resources that gets in the way of consuming our products. If all goes well, even the professors will see decreased productivity. Decreased productivity among professors, means fewer students will be exposed to that "critical thinking" nonsense which destroys good consumers. I look forward to your reply, Dell Marketing
... and then they built the supercollider.
Theres a company called Ruckus that does this also. Saw them a year ago or so at an education conference. Very cool service that also includes feature movies. You colocate their hardware on your campus, and they come swap out hard drives every couple of weeks.
Good interface and good content. Also witht the ability for students to burn/keep/buy music as an option.
Dell refuses to offer consumers an alternative to Microsoft.
Dell continues to protect Microsoft's desktop monopoly.
Refuse to do business with Dell.
Servers full of music might make tempting targets to "pirates."
I doubt it. They are probably just going to be full of DRM'd crap. Copyright infringers will still get their files from elsewhere. It's the law-abiding students that will have to deal with the DRM.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
My campus (Southwest Missouri State University) just went to this plan with Napster, much to the chagrin of our computer community. The student government association said it sounded like a great idea while most of the students complained about it. The issue isn't that students have to pay to subscribe for the service, but rather that it is paid for by a student fee increase. This means that every student pays a fee for this service, including the ones that A) don't use it and/or B) don't have a computer. Moreover, the students that really download a lot are going to continue doing it through established mediums such as Kazaa or Bittorrent which will have a larger library than the ones Napstar establishes on the local servers. In general, it's a waste of money, but maybe it'll convince them to lift the bandwidth limit they imposed on campus last year. That's about the only benefit I can see from putting this plan into effect: a false sense of security from which many can benefit. Probably not worth the fee increase though.
As I seem to remember, he was in a pot bust. (Like, who even remembers back that far? You must be, like, old or something.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
What makes you think that universities could be considered for Common Carrier status. I think maybe you should go look up what Cammon Carrier means in the telecommunications industry. Since neither ISP's nor Cable networks are considered common carriers I think a private network like a University would have no chance. Just so you know, you can't claim common carrier, it's a classification that the FCC bestows on you and it comes with massive regulation.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
I think this is a very good thing. There are many universities (Miami for example) that offer students free access to Napster. Since it's free, I can imagine most of the students take advantage of it, which would create a heavy server load.
So I think plans like these really could help reduce piracy
Why should a school pay to help out a business? A business that is COSTING the school in it's bandwidth.
I say the college's let the Napster/Dell install the devices for free or a small fee.
This way the colleges AND Napster save bandwidth.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
So you're saying that the schools should, in addition to music, archive warez iso, dvd rips of movies, dvd images and porn locally to reduce stress on the bandwidth? This is a great idea. I just don't know if Dell is going to be as excited about teaming up with the goatse guy to deliver local, hi-quality porn as they were to team up with Napster.
Maybe the goatse guy can partner with apple? They seem to have some unique market penetration these days.
--
RumorsDaily
Supposedly, they let us download as many files as we want, except they'll expire in a few months when the 'free trial subscribtion' ends. There were even talks of having this program paid for by our tuition but luckily that got squashed.
'Services' like this are not going to work; people are just not as dumb as the RIAA and the gooneys that work for them believe they are, IMHO.
Yes, tis true. We are the future!
Anything that prevents that sort of knee-jerk idiocy from happening again is okay in my book
:-)
Not downloading more than a gig per day seems like a good start.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
I will be attending Penn State University in the fall and amongst all of my computer registration stuff there was something about Napster. It appears that PSU has some deal with them. All PSU students get Napster's Premium Service for free. Not that I will be using it when I get there, I'll probablly just VNC to a computer at home and download my stuff onto that and pick it up on the weekend. But it is still interesting how they got that.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
... has come to be like running water or electricity: a basic need. College campuses must understand that and act accordingly. You wouldn't cut everyones electricity just because there's someone with a stereo real loud, or you wouldn't cut the whole block's running water just because there are stupid kids throwing water balloons at cars in the street.
--MaxPowerDJ
Penn State is providing free music from Napster for around a year now. The music files are locally cached and the service is fast. I guess people tend to rely less on illigal downloading of music when they have ready access to seemingly free legal downloads with some restrictions.
Dell refuses to offer consumers an alternative to Microsoft.
You can buy servers with Linux, and Desktop PCs and Notebooks without an OS. http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx ?cs=555&oc=PE1420SATAPAD&m_8=40GS&c=us&l=en&s=biz" >Look at all those OS choices!
Dell continues to protect Microsoft's desktop monopoly. How exactly? They offer alternatives and the option to choose no OS at all.
Refuse to do business with Dell.
That's well within your rights to choose to do so, and I encourage that. However, if you are doing so based on the above, then you are a misinformed consumer.
I personally prefer internet radio for most of listening. With the students' iTunes collections shared, it's like having a completely on-demand internet radio, that almost never suffers bottlenecks.
We're also pretty good about keeping after virii, and get most machines patched within a couple days of a new breakout (part of this is by semi-enforcing XP for PC users).
antipaucity
I'd rather go on iTunes (which I do) and download a song for 99 cents and keep it forever and not have to worry about paying upkeep to keep my music playing.
Universities should not be wasting money on services like these. It is a waste of money that could be pumped into, I dunno, education? Its even more of a waste considering the majority of students won't even use the service either, considering the students want an *MP3* player, they can get a student discount on an iPod at the campus Apple store...not to mention getting an iPod Mini free if they buy an iBook. That transfers the burden on the students and not the university itself.
Regardless, the campus IT departments should simply block ports on their networks disabling P2P usage, and ban/restrict students caught using P2P programs. Taking a proactive approach would also most likely shield the universities from a court action by the RIAA or the MPAA by consistently showing the university is not negligently tolerating piracy on their networks. That is a better approach than forking over a blank check to Dell and Napster for hardware/services that won't even be used by the majority of students.
I think I shall contact the alumni center of my ol' university (UC Davis) and vent my displeasure over any such offer that might've been put forth by Dell and Napster.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
- there have got to be higher priorities for colleges
- Napster is a fading light, which is moreso confirmed by this
- college students are adults (or in some cases near-adults); they can choose what to do with their time- they're paying the tuition
- if we don't get music one way we'll find 10 others
- how does downloading differ from listening to the radio? i could record off the radio if i so chose.
- the bigger issue of the government cracking down on piracy so supposedly "fiercely" proves how skewed america's priorities are - it's simply an issue of the record companies not getting that other few million, boo hoo.
It's stupid from the perspective of the RIAA, perhaps. Quite frankly, though, university admins care far more about bandwidth than they do about stopping the Reefer^H^H^H^H^H^HMP3 Madness. If everyone and their brother never downloaded from the outside world but shared their entire MP3 collection on the dorm LANs, the admins would be a happy bunch. UIUC, by the way, gives students a ~750MB quota per 24-hour period -- but the quota does not apply to connections inside the uiuc.edu domain. Combine that with sufficient internal mirrors for the legal stuff and everyone is happy except for the RIAA. And, honeslty, raise your hands if you pity them.
Anyone? anyone? Beuller? anyone?
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
Univ Network Admins have to balance the needs of students, faculty and staff when it comes to network usage.
Indeed, and the obvious solution is to put students on a physically separate network (with separate transit and everything).
University of Rochester had (2004-2005) a pilot program where Napster services were provided free to the students. We're not sure where the funding for it came from, but it wasn't from tuition. We had several administration-student talks and the general consensus was that it would be very unfair to include that as part of our bill (particularly since Napster is Windows-only).
Mod this up!
The grandparent post has no idea what he is talking about, and I can't believe that it has +5 Insightful.
College networks are private networks and are not Common Carriers. It is like saying people who work for Ford abusing their Internet previleges, but saying that Ford has no part in it whatsoever. There is a reason why all corporations have policies on what you can do with their networks.
+5 Insightful my ass.
facts: downloading music illegally is a pain in the ass. problems like quality, difficulty in finding what you want, bandwidth on both supply and demand ends, and the fear of getting arrested all are things that discourage illegal music trading.
So why does it still go on? This is the easy part: Legally purchased music is expensive enough that the trouble and risk are worth it. If you want to eliminate (or at least reduce it to irrelevance) you need to lower the price below the "pain in the ass" threshold.
99 cents a song seems to be the current pricetag everyone is being offered. Sounds low, right? But when a CD I can buy for $9.99 is going to cost me $14 to download, downloading just became my THIRD choice, behind purchase and piracy.
Basically, the music industry is using online distribution as a new and better way to gouge the consumers at at even GREATER gross margin than ever before. They don't have to make the CD's, ship them, or worry about inventory at all, it's the deal of the century for hte record companies.
$5 a CD, .50 a song. Piracy will blow away like dust in the wind, and profits will soar like never before.
Ah, hell. That was funny! Damn you moderators. Damn you!
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RumorsDaily
That's why public universities are good. They're not allowed to censor.
I think you are confusing repressing free speech and stopping illegal activities.
It does not matter if it is a public university, if you are conducting illegal activity (and the university has reasonable evidence to that effect), they are obligated to shut you down.
Not in Sweden, afaik. They're not allowed to spy for illegal activities. I have no idea how they will react to any **AA style activities, though.
Does Metallica knows about this?
I bet they're pissed.
A computer makes it possible to do, in half an hour, tasks which were completely unnecessary to do before.
not everyone knows how to setup and run a ftp server, nor find the local one on campus. But hey, kazaa will find it all for you, just need to install it. You can search, just double click to start downloading, makes it easy, so college students use it.
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Apple STARTED this. For a "Mac zealot" you're behind the times. :)
http://www.apple.com/education/itunesoncampus/
... this won't help. little 3 MB songs are NOT clogging your networks, University X. Big 3.x GB movie downloads probably do a lot more damage. The way to alleviate "outside" access from universities is to educate people on bittorrent. Another thing you could do is support the hosting of internal DC++ like communities. When they limited the bandwidth at my university, we all used DC++ and found that within our students, we had plenty to feast on. No, I'm not saying universities should aid in illegal file sharing. But if you set up legal file sharing and actually share interesting things on it, maybe people will look into it and participate in this so called "higher learning" that you fake to deliver for 40,000 a year.
While I fully believe that they sell servers with Linux pre-installed, I've never had them let me buy a notebook with Linux.
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Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
The college I attend (UT Knoxville) has been offering this service for over a year and a half.It's a really good deal if you think about it,$5 a semester and all the music you want.
right here
The Register sees this an RIAA tax imposed on the students at large.
It's not because of some microsoft conpsiracy, it's because driver support is laxing on brand new launching systems. And also because the tech support costs would increase, not to mention the sustaining costs of having multiple OSes.
It's not Dell trying to support some Microsoft conspiracy. You can still buy notebooks and destkops without an os at all. Allthough you may have to call to do it, instead of order from the website.
I should have more correctly stated that they wouldn't let me get a laptop with no OS (or with DR-DOS); it was XP Home or Pro or no sale. This is counter to your claim that they did offer notebooks sans OS. Please provide links; I'd be very interested in buying such a notebook (as a home user, note; were I to buy 50 pcs, things might well be different). It need not come with Linux; I just don't need yet another Windows license I'm not gonna use.
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Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Forgive me because I have never used Napster, but are they only RIAA music, or do they have music from independent labels as well?
I do not imagine that stuff from John Zorn's Tzadik label is especially popular among the kids, but I may be going back to college soon, and if this were available, and they had the obscure music I like to listen to, this might be nice to sign up with.
But if they only stuff I can get is Britney Spears and U2 then no thank you.
(I will now await getting flamed by U2 fans.)
(Sounds like a spyplane.)
This signature used to contain a cute kitty virus with ansii art. Please set the slashdot editors on fire. Thank you
Remind me how offering faster legal downloads will help this problem? People who download illegally will still continue to download illigally (at least most of them) regardless of how fast legal downloads are. Especially in college, time isn't always more important than money. Sounds to me to be just a money-making PR ploy...
At my school, last year our IT department was forced to start limiting bandwidth, not because there were a bunch of people downloading an album here or there, but because a select few people would download 7-8 GB torrents of entire TV series and seed them for weeks and weeks... I believe this is true because before the limits, I was getting slower-than-dialup speeds and crazy pings around 1100ms, and afterwards (the limits only cap after downloading or uploading a large amount of data, over 300MB in a day) I got over 300KB/s down and pings around 100...
int cents = 0;
cents += 2;
Your link is broken dude.
You have not shown a Link for a non-Microsoft CONSUMER computer.
Servers and high end workstations don't count.
" Universities are theoretically in the business of providing advanced education and doing research. I fail to see where providing a captive market for private companies benefits either of these. Furthermore, doing so would involve at least some staff time and other university resources which could be used instead to further the main goals of research and education."
The captive market for music already exists. Their options are to either spend a lot of time blocking packets to unclog their network, spend more money on better networking, or subscribe to this service, which unclogs the network and removes fear of legal liability if they can make it work.
The rest of your post is just anti-MS FUD.
Vote for Pedro
Well, you're both right and at the same time quite misleading. ISPs are not common carriers, but they have a set of rules which exempt them from copyright liability (I don't remember the paragraph), and the big catch is that you can not edit the content. If you first start doing so, you take responsibility for everything you miss. So they don't.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's not because of some microsoft conpsiracy,
It is because of Microsoft co-opt advertisement agreements and kickbacks. Dell is knowingly preventing entry of competition. Dell is anti consumer choice. Dell is anti-competitive.
Am I the only one who thought this said "Napster and Dell going directly to Hell"?
If universities actively use their resources to push the Napster service, they are actively using their resources to help MS break the law in two ways: extend the desktop monopoly and break into the audio/video market.
The universities in the US are moving to Internet2 which will alleviate the traffic problem for quite some time. Another approach would be for universities, as far as their networks go, adopt the role of a Common Carrier just like any other ISP. Since, in that context the universities are operating like an ISP and should not be the parent. Students are presumably of age of majority (though I argue for raising that from 18 to 25) and therefore at least in theory responsible for their own behavior. That would remove the need for fear of legal liability, too.Or the MPAA/RIAA could modernize its business. Being a bottleneck in distribution of entertainment doesn't work once you go beyond distribution fof physical media and enter the world of networked computing. Nor does the current move towards extortion seem to be either popular nor sustainable. Just because they once had a model that used to be profitable doesn't mean the world owes them a handout to keep them in money once that model becomes antiquated. The times don't fit the MPAA/RIAA's outmoded business model, they need to adapt or die.
Regarding part about DRM, if there is a way to install the DRM on a Windows machine so that it is only available to the audio player and not the video player or any other applications, then by all means please post the link. All articles I've seen to date indicate that it affects the whole machine.Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's FUD. And just because it doesn't favor MS doesn't mean it's FUD either. MS has worked hard over many years to earn the poor reputation it has among the tech community for it's shoddy software and predatory business methods.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
As I have said numerous times before but I'll say it again.
ISP's are considered by the FCC to be ESP's (Enhanced Service Providers). They are NOT subject to the same regulations as Telecom Common Carriers, they are not regulated under Title II, and they are exempt from the access charges of long distance carriers ("Access charges" are fees collected by the local telephone companies for the origination or termination of any interstate or foreign telecommunication).
All in all ISPs are end users of the telephone network, like you and me, and while they are not entirely responsible for the content which crosses their network, they may be required to monitor and turn over the names of their customers who engage in illegal activity which is something that common carriers are protected from.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.