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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."
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.
So... what about people who like good music?
-FL
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.
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.
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
...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.
I agree. For the most part the music trading that I see involves one person purchasing a CD/Song (as often as not on iTunes) and then ripping it and distributing among friends. The greatest bandwidth hog is the Babylon 5 Season 5 part one torrent, or simpsons, south park , family guy, whatever.
My last 2 years of college those around me had basically stopped using p2p for music. Most illegal music downloads started because there was no legal way to do it, and downloading was far more convenient than going to a store to buy a full album so you could hear a single song. iTunes (and I suppose other services, though I don't use any of those) has basically filled that need. TV and movies are the next content types that will need to move to legally downloadable media, and once that happens much of the illegal traffic will stop (note that legal traffic would still be a bandwidth concern).
I do think this model is a wise one. With the advent of legal movie/TV downloads this strategy will work quite well to help relieve bandwidth problems, though I would contest the blatant sponsorship of one service over another that is implied by using school resources to play host. So, in summary, I think they have a decent idea (though off target) that needs a good deal of development, and I think the entertainment industry as a whole needs to realize that much of the illegal traffic over the internet is because people want to use the internet to get their content of choice, and when it is not available legitimately they will turn to illegitimate means. Here ends my rather lengthy babbling.
"It is sad to see a family torn apart by something as simple as a pack of wild dogs."
At my school, kids set up a dcc hub to distribute media on campus rather than using the fat pipes. After the school yelled at the kids for that and starting blocking popular incoming ports, they thought they solved the "P2P problem. But this only caused all downloading to come from off campus rather than local transferring.
I had the opportunity to explain to them that this decision is why their dual ds3 utilization went from 40% to peaked 75% of the time.
- 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.
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.