Slashdot Mirror
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..."
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.
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!)
What you need to remember is that Univ Network Admins have to balance the needs of students, faculty and staff when it comes to network usage. I was at Penn State when Napster really took off and even lived in the dorms. I was also a computer lab student manager for one of the colleges at the time. One day we all woke up and the network was just slammed. It had been getting progressively slower for weeks leading up to this point as everyone and their brother was downloading off of Napster (and uploading a fair bit too). The traffic from the student housing network eventually flooded the entire state-wide University system.
Network traffic is like traffic in major city areas. You can keep adding capacity but people will just use up to that capacity no matter how large. We had a pretty big pipe to the net, but the student network segment alone saturated it, preventing faculty and staff from conducting research, using university systems related to classes etc... In short, students downloading music had managed to shut down any and all legitimate academic uses. The University could no longer operate.
The solution initially was to put an overall cap on the student segment, limiting all residence halls to one shared 20mbit connection. Needless to say that was a nightmare and students had faster connections dialing up to the Univ modem bank. Then they moved to bandwith caps. 1gig up, 1 gig down per week. A pretty reasonable limit if you ask me.
You want to cast blame at the admins, saying they're evil and uncaring and just out to screw the students, but you have to always remember that there are others who have just as much need for the network as students do. When it comes to downloading music and movies, I'd even say they have a more legitimate claim too. Giving students unlimited bandwidth has been proven to be a bad idea. Given limited resources, they have to portion everything off so the most people have usable access for legitimate purposes.
I don't know... The "unlimited access to 1,000,000" is something both Napster and Yahoo are pushing. I've been using Yahoo's for only a few days now, and the $7/month covers me listening to a whole lot of CDs I've always wanted to listen to. Most of them I wouldn't have taken a chance on purchasing, and definitely wouldn't now that I have listened to them. Still, that's a lot of access to a lot of music even if I don't get to keep it.
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.
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.
... 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
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*