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Students Skip College Music Services
WSJdpatton writes "College students don't turn down much that's free. But when it comes to online music, even free hasn't been enough to persuade many students to use the digital download services colleges and universities are providing." I know that the Ctrax service offered by my current school — Temple University — and many others (it's "available to all college students with a '.edu' email address") has an ugly, awkward interface. Worse, the free (gratis) part is an expiring, "tethered" collection of music for those who use it; downloads to keep are fee-per-track.
Just because a bag of crap is free doesn't mean it's worth the hassle of obtaining it.
I love the free Napster service that my school (GW) gives, but many people use iPods and find it easier to steal music through MyTunes or OurTunes.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
They have CTrax at my school. It's horrible. Everyone has an iPod and uses iTMS or gets their music illegally on the school's DC++ hub. Nobody really seems to know why we have CTrax.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
"College students don't turn down much that's free ... downloads to keep are fee-per-track."
Surprise surprise!
If most of the services charge for downloads you can keep, its hardly free is it? In either sense of the word.
Maybe. But to make free content interesting, it has to be free in the OTHER sense first. If it's free in the financial aspect, that's a bonus, but not the primary concern.
That's the main beef I got with DRM. Not that I have to pay per view, or that I should pay more or whatever. It is the fact that I cannot use the content I pay for in an enjoyable way. It's the tether attached, not the price tag.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
the email introducing the service explained that students could keep their songs only until they graduated. "After I read that, I decided I didn't want to even try it,"
This is seriously not enforced, so they shouldn't worry about it. I still use software (mostly MSFT and Anti-virus stuff) I received free from college. And I graduated several years ago already.
Mr Pot, meet Mr Kettle.
The biggest insult you can give a company has got to be to refuse their product when they want to give it to you for free...
I'm not really sure what this article is exactly talking about. Is there software out there that's school-specific and has some kinda cheap-o free music they can have? I do marketing for Apple, and students eat up the $1 iTunes gift cards I give out.
It's one thing to pull an Apple and try to limit my music to one machine, but when my music needs to phone home once a week to unlock itself, that's a whole next level of wrong. I tried using our University's music system "Ruckus", but after the first "lockout" message I encountered during one of our frequent internet outages, I was done for life.
The reason why I don't use ruckus (or any other paid download service) is because of the incredibly lackluster selection that all music stores have. This isn't their fault - I imagine it would be hard to get the rights to sell obscure Norwegian death metal band's albums, but it still means that I'm double clicking Azuereus more than anything else.
Careful... there are lots of Free Software advocates around here that you're liable to upset!
Ok, want a big reason this failed? College students have varied and wide-ranging tastes in music. Your typical college frat-rocker or indie snob most likely won't like the range of artists offered on the "free" services when compared to itunes or any decent bittorrent tracker.
I guarantee that 90% of music reccomended by sites like Pitchfork aren't available on these services. If they were, people would use them.
The exact same thing happened at my school, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Except thanks to the ignorant members of our student "government" (I use that term very, very loosely) technically we brought it on outselves.
We got the "Ruckus" music service - which doesn't work on Mac OS X or iPods - and is little better than an extremely low quality (and ugly) jukebox.
Of course, 99% of RPI students are still illegally stealing music on the internet, but the school and the student government don't care because they look good for having "a legal alternative."
Apparently someone forgot to tell them about the iTunes music store (and the plethora of other online stores).
You can call college students a lot of things - including stupid. But apparently we're not stupid enough to embrace crappy music services when we can do better using P2P file sharing software.
Haiku for you!
Yahoo Music lets you stream anything for free, even download for free. If you need to have an mp3 you can pay less than a dollar. Their collection is outstanding. It would be great for college students
why would college students stream a very limited number of songs one at a time when they can download as many songs as they want for free using bittorrent?
You got that right, but I prefer the "free as in drugs" metaphor here. They are trying to get you hooked and then charge you for it later. What no one in the industry seems to get is that people will pay for the "free as in speech" type, and there are enough that care to be legal to make it a worthwhile model despite all the piracy. The industry tries so hard to stop the pirates that they turn the legit users into thieves.
Some people may remember RPI for its consistent involvement in the RIAA college lawsuits.
Needless to say, as soon as the first group of 30 were sued for using i2hub, the student council inexplicably gets an offer from the otherwise unknown music service known as Ruckus. The student council was at least nice enough to give us a chance to respond to a survey regarding our acceptance of a music service on campus, but despite an underwhelming response of 23%, RPI inexplicably chooses Ruckus to be its provider, despite the fact that 2/3rds of poll respondants wanted MP3 downloads, 90% wanted to burn CDs, and 85% wanted to download and own the music, and Ruckus is, of course, none of these, supporting only Microsoft DRM.
Despite some quiet rancor about the deal, and its possible relationship to a 'blackmail' deal with the RIAA, the student council twisted the facts and approved Ruckus anyway, intending to keep it through the 06-07 year, despite some qualms about its quality of service.
I haven't seen any long-term reviews of it either though, but I'm not particularly a fan of it. Too bad we students will have to pay for it in the end even if we don't want it.
I currently attend Penn State, where Napster is offered to students for free. I primarily use this program as a streaming service. Since I listen to such an extremely wide array of albums (not songs), that downloading would be pointless. I find that Napster is a perfect tool for finding independent and foreign artists; I can listen to new offerings without making an upfront investment as I would with a pay-per-track service such as iTunes.
I think Napster is perfect for people who have eclectic tastes in music and are interested in discovering new artists. I plan on buying a subscription when I graduate.
Wow. You know your business model's in trouble if your own VP doesn't buy into your FUD.
Man, I miss the good ol' days when you could run a music FTP undetectable on the university's fat pipe, and nobody would bat an eye. The selection was usually better than the RIAA's endless crapstream of "tunes," too.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
What college did you go to?
I graduated a couple years ago, and it seemed to my that most college students' taste in music was as generic as the rest of the listening public. I was a big indie snob myself, but for every one of us, there were 20 students jamming to Britney Spears and Eminem.
I thought colleges were offering education, not music.
So you have a college students that want something, and another group that offers them something else and is suprised that the reaction of the students.
Does this not describe the entire recent history of the RIAA?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Get off your high horse. The fact that you actually found a response from a student is amazing.
With colleges these days that student is most likely already expelled or booted out of any hope
of a normal education. In the 70's you could have a riot, lately if you caused a riot it would be
considered discrimination against quiet people then homeland security would come to fight the terrorist (Voters).
15 years ago, you could play a Hendrix tune on your instrument in front of a few hundred people and it'd be called a party.
Now a day, you'd be fined to the Stone Age.
Students live in a world without profit. Is it so wrong that when students look at music and do not see how you can corrupt it with million dollar idiots such as our current billboard charts?
It takes the pompous level of a degree before you can start looking at how you can corrupt everything for a profit.
Who ever tried to make a profit off students in the first place made a stupid business plan.
Students are poor, and are already should be trying to spend all of their money on education.
If society gave a crap about students they would dedicate more money to them instead of raising the interest rates on their loans.
Since society doesn't seem to care about the next generation, the next generation does care about society. (Copy write, private property, drugs, crime).
So write to the dean and ruin some kid's chance.
I'm sure you will only further distort the issue in your mind and it will make you feel better.
... you mean like itunes?
Id love to buy an ipod if i could simply drag & drop files to it. I HATE being tethered to someone elses idea of a do-all "media center" especially if the damn thing is as poorly concieved as itunes.
Till then ill stick with my rio
In order to succeed in any field, you have to outdo the competition. These "free" services are not acknowledging the fact that their direct competition isn't only iTunes, but the illicit file-swapping services. Were I a college student who could magic up a torrent of completely free MP3s or OGGs which are perfectly archivable and portable, the only thing that would really sway me from this (if I were the type to even consider switching) would be something with a comparable level of usability, yet legal. For all but the most paranoid file-swappers, the simple fact that a junky service is OMG LEGAL!!!#$%^ really isn't enough to justify the insane levels of crippling they're doing to the media. And the rest of the kids aren't so against dropping a few dollars on iTunes for what they want.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Here's their site. I haven't had the chance to try it out yet, because it's Windows only, and right now I'm on a Mac laptop only. Them's the breaks. I know the University doesn't have any responsibility to support less common OSes, but their bookstore is an Apple dealer and the certified repair shop for Apples in town. They showcase Apple machines--all of the laptops, iMacs, and the PowerMac--and just one Windows machine. Because of this, there's a decent amount of Mac laptops on campus. I see them around.
Other students don't like it because they can't put any music onto their MP3 players where they listen to most of their music, unless they pay, and it won't work on the ever popular iPod period. (I don't have one, but that's the majority MP3 player at my school, and the bookstore has a copious display case dedicated to them, too.) That's not surprising, of course, since Apple doesn't license their DRM out. The only MP3 players that work with Ruckus are ones with Microsoft's Playsforsure with subscription services. Evidently, having Playsforsure isn't quite enough to be sure it will work. Ruckus also serves as a movie serving network, but our campus hasn't had that running yet. The student organization is currently investing in the expensive on-campus download servers required to operate that service.
This article on BusinessWeek says that Ruckus can net anywhere from $10 to $100 dollars a student. I'm really just hoping my university is closer to the $10 side of the spectrum.
Have you read Pitchfork lately? It's indie pandering at its worst.
Fran Dunphy (from Penn) is quite sane. A step up from John Cheyney in both sanity and coaching ability.
It's always been like that, hasn't it?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
My university allowed on-campus students to download music to their systems for free from CTrax. However, they dropped it during the spring. The reason is that nobody used it. It is not because they did not want free music, far from it. But when the service is much more trouble than it's worth, the people will just turn to other sources. I didn't use it for three reasons.
A) The interface was poorly designed and implemented in my opinion. A poor interface will stop a lot of people.
B) It forced the use of Internet Explorer on its site. I refuse to use IE. It is not because I am anti-MS, but it is because I have had serious problems in windows created by security flaws in IE. Furthermore, this dependency on IE screwed users of other OS's.
C) All of the music was wma format with DRM. I don't like DRM. Not only that, I fairly frequently reinstall windows on my machine because I frequently change hardware and/or toy with my system in various ways. Those files don't like being used after windows has been reinstalled due to previously stated hw changes.
Because of these problems, I found other sources for music.
My university is attempting to get a Ruckus setup starting spring semester of the 2006-2007 school year. When their sales rep came in for a short question and answer period to speak to our RHA (Residence Hall Association. Think student congress, but for housing/dining concerns; that, and we actually get things done) general assembly. Everyone thought that this service was great until I asked a 2 part question.
"How many of you guys (the students) use iPods?"
The answer of course was nearly 75%. I then turned to the sales rep and asked him:
"Is your music fully compatable with iPods/iTunes?"
"...Um....no..."-The response I was fully expecting.
Of course, most people didn't understand that the music service that we would be using instead would have stricter DRM imposed upon it, versus the (relatively) lax restrictions used on iTunes AAC-LC files. Take a guess what the results of the vote were.
That's right, only two other people in a voting population of nearly 50 students joined me in voting against this proposal. Why? Are people genuinely so uninformed that they would purposefully cripple their personal audio devices? Is it that people are scared of the RIAA/MPAA?
Whatever the case is, I will still get my music from a vast and large repository, one with nearly unlimited resources. I can get this music in any bitrate that I want, and best of all, I don't have any DRM attached to the files. I'm glad that I work at the library.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
I go to Purdue University, and they offer Ctrax. I figured I would try it one day, but as soon as the hideous interface came up I closed it and never thought about it again.
This is not like software that you can just install and keep running.
The music checks back with the server every so often to make sure you are still authorized to play. If you are not listed as a student, your ability to play is gone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's even less free than the 'voluntary library gift' (the $50 charge that GW puts on your bill each semester, that you have to request be removed).
It may be free in that you don't have to directly pay Napster, but the money has to come from somewhere -- it's probably covered under the 'Student Activities Fee' or one of the other many fees that you get hit with each semester.
(yes, I'm cynical -- I'm both an alum, and an ex-ISS employee. I've seen how much GW wastes on bad IT implementation. Hell, I even reported Nabih Bedewi to the engineering school for misappropriation of equipment almost a decade ago.)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I thought this was about the other free music college students turn down... the live type with string instruments, brass instruments and choirs. Its ironic college kids turn down all types of free music except free to illegally copy type.
Worse, the free (gratis) part is an expiring, "tethered" collection of music for those who use it; downloads to keep are fee-per-track.
d s/catalina/producthome.asp
:) If your PC and soundcard are fast enough, you might be able to get away with 1 PC, 1 Digital I/O soundcard, and a digital 'loopback cable' (if such a thing exists or can be created) to connect the digital I/O ports together on the soundcard when stripping DRM from digital audio files.
.WAV files) and burn your own CDs if you so choose -- everything else out there is essentially 'radio quality' and is basically 'promotional material' that should have a pricetag of $0.00
DRM workaround for cheapskates....
2 PC's
2 sound cards with digital I/O such as the (currently unavailable [for good?]) Catalina soundcards from Turtle Beach
http://www.turtlebeach.com/site/products/soundcar
Enjoy! (Did RIAA 'lean' on Turtle Beach to 'pull' these sound cards from the market?...)
P.S.: This is the best, simplest, straightforward, 'secure', method to strip DRM from digital audio files with 100% fidelity to the original file. Right up there with the Windows 'shift key' trick to avoid pwning your PC with a DRM/anticopy encumbered audio CD before you play/rip it....
P.P.S: If you are going to buy digital audio media online, buy lossless DRM-free CD quality audio media (i.e.
Of course, that would be illegal... I find most honest people can live with the restrictions. It's just that most people aren't honest.
Using Napster doesn't mean that when it goes away I can't go to P2P to get the same music.
You have some good points but I think you are making a mistake here.
Downloading P2P from a university means you are less likley to get sude (because university admins have to agree to pass your info on to the RIAA) and you are taking advantage of a very powerful connection.
If you choose to download later outside of school you face a greater risk of being sued (not much greater, but still) and have to use your own bandwidth which is likley to be substantially less.
Basically you are wasting a good opportunity by using the free service.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Can't keep the music after graduation? Can't burn songs to CD? That's not free. The WSJ should not have used that term so carelessly. They fell hard for typical RIAA propaganda. The RIAA routinely tries to swap black and white, and then acting as if everyone agrees with their interpretation, proceeds with all sorts of arguments that would make perfect sense if the foundation they were based on was solid.
I especially enjoyed Sherman's statement: 'Universities have a particular responsibility to teach students the value of intellectual property because they are "probably the No. 1 creator of intellectual property."' Many professors do their own thing of course, but too many professors are more interested in mining their grad students' ideas for things they can publish under their own names and get all the credit for themselves. The Universities quietly prefer this because they have rights over their employees' thinking, but not their customer's. And let's not forget the racket (usually university run, but not necessarily) whereby publishers cheat the professors who cheated the students. Next time you see one of those digital libraries that is pleased to offer the opportunity to purchase copies of a paper for the low low price of $10 each, know that the authors of that paper will receive precisely 0% of that money. Those are the values that are passed on, that those of you who have "paid your dues" and had the honor of having a professor lift your work out of the morass of trash and sloppy thinking and fix it up and publish it, can, if you choose, one day go on to become publishers or professors and get in on the gravy side of the racket.
I also enjoyed the whine about students spurning Napster to buy from iTunes.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
The reason that students aren't jumping on the DRM-friendly bandwagon, even when it's free, is because DRM tech makes it difficult (or impossible) for people to share music with each other.
When people share something, they're giving you a taste of what it is that they like - they're teaching you about themselves. You learn what makes 'em tick. It's a human bonding experience, a way that people become closer, and a way to find folks like you (if someone's got a very similar collection of music, they may have a similar mind).
DRM prevents this basic human experience from happening.
Before BitTorrent we had Kazaa,
before Kazaa we had Napster,
before Napster we traded mp3s via FTP servers and by swapping data CDs in person,
before mp3s we exchanged burned CDs,
before CDs existed we traded custom tapes we'd made,
and so on and so forth, ad nauseum.
People enjoy sharing music with each other. I'm surprised the industry execs still haven't understood this important, basic concept - they must really be out of touch with reality these days.
I don't know about you, but iTunes doesn't go very far into the kind of stuff I listen to now, or listened to in college for that matter. It's still pretty strictly mainstream from my experience.
Of course when I was in college in the 80's, a couple of bucks at the used record store bought you all kinds of neat stuff that you can't find on iTunes (or even bittorrent most of the time).
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
When my dad when to college in the 50's, it was pretty affordable. The university offered the following services: classes, access to professors, labs, libraries. As nicities that also had housing, food, and athletic facilities.
Fast forward 50 years. Now the universities seem to be some kind of theme park, and as the mafia expression says, everyone pays. Why the hell are universities so much into the entertainment business that they're offering students involuntary music service subscriptions? Liability issues aside (I don't think the RIAA could win such a case against a university anyway), this is just f*@*ing ridiculous. Univerities do NOT need to be county clubs that happen to offer classes to interested sober members.
I'm curious to know why iTMS is preferable! I would be broke if I had to pay a dollar for every song I wanted! Instead, I pay Virgin Digital $15/mo (less than the cost of a CD) and I can download to my heart's content (from a larger catalog than iTMS even!) and even take the music with me on my Rio Carbon. My iPod is now collecting dust on my dresser. Now, if someone were giving me Napster for free, I'd be using that!
So let me get this straight ... you get access to a large selection of music with mildly annoying DRM for free but if you want a non-expiring version, then you have to pay for it?
If you think this is poor, woe betide you when you get out into the "real world" as you'll find out that no-one here gets free unlimited downloads in that way and, shock horror, also has to pay for non-expiring versions of the music they like.
Personally, I think its a bit much you complaining about something for free which is obviously being paid for by someone else, but there you go.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Herpes. College students don't want that either.
What's wrong about it? Nobody owns a song any more than one can own an idea. Where do you get the idea that people should pay for the reproduction of something?
When I was staying in the dorms here at UW Madison, iTunes music sharing over the dorm-wide LAN was more than enough for my needs. It was instant access to more music than I could ever have time to listen to. And with myTunes & ourTunes I could download everything at 100 mbps :)
Never been to a party sponsored by any of the big beer brands?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Pitchfork is an interesting beast.
For one, their writing style is over the top to the point of insanity. We get it. You aced Creative Writing in college. Good job!
On the other hand, their tastes in music are, in my opinion, a pretty good reflection of the college demographic. A weird anomaly, however, is that their scoring system is entirely arbitrary -- at times it's subtractive, with one bad song causing the album to lose several points, and at times, it's additive, with albums getting 9/10 ratings for one or two good songs with the rest being garbage. Artists generally take their ratings with a huge grain of salt.
Generally speaking, most of the music I like that gets reviewed by them scores somewhere between 7-9 out of 10. Anything above a 9 is too weird for my tastes.
And they've seriously got to kick their radiohead addiction.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I didn't say whether I thought it was 'right' or 'wrong'.
"Stop murdering people!"
"I'm not murdering people, I'm stealing lollipops!"
"Whatever! It's all just semantics. Stop trying to justify it."
Simple ethics and morality. Forget the pretentious nonsense and the lecturing about the immoral RIAA for a moment...
If you're being charged for a CD and the music's not being offered for free download on the band's web site in the format you desire, then that means that everyone involved with that production -- musicians, session musicians, recording engineers, graphic artists, marketers, etc., etc. -- put their time in to an effort that they knowingly expected would be sold.
If you disagree with that philosophy then at least have the courage of your convictions to just not buy it and say "I object to this premise on moral grounds, therefore I will forgo the pleasure of listening of that song". Anything else is hypocritical self-serving nonsense.
I use Ruckus, but during the school year when everyone uses it the website is terribly slow, and the actual program itself is buggy too with a bad UI. They need to realize that even if it's free, not many people want to use a flawed system. Fix that and then see if people like it more. Not to mention it's Windows only.
At American University we use Napster and I liked it a lot. It was a pretty good program and had pretty much any song you could want. Now that I'm out of college though it looks like I'm going to have to return to illegal file sharing (Not that I'd ever download a song without paying for it).
Why should a musician or a company, even a greedy insolent exploitative company, be compelled to give away its products?
Do you give away all of your work, or even some of it? If you work for a big, greedy company, do they give away their main product?
Surely, many things can be had for free, especially if you are willing to tolerate some additional advertising, or spend lots of money on consumables later. Indeed, some have proposed ways for musicians to make a living giving away recordings and making money on live performances. But for the public to expect that an entire genre of product to be free, in this case recorded music, is absolutely ludicrous. In any case, there is nothing wrong with somebody wanting to make a living selling recorded music.
On the other hand, RIAA members are insistent on a dead business model. To my mind, it is difficult to justify in today's digital world, a price higher than a few cents for a track of music. The vast economies of scale and modest costs of production and distribution on a planetary scale have utterly destroyed the notion of selling what used to be known as "record albums." If advertising and promotion are claimed to be the big cost, then change the model and stop wasting so much money building personality cults around wannabe celebrity musicians.
Free isn't free. The music expires over a period of time, and you can't put it on an mp3 player. Personally I subscribe to Ruckus, because it is free through my college. I wouldn't have signed up at all if I wasn't able to convert all the files to mp3 using TuneBite. Regardless, their interface is clunky and their software sucks and contains ads. If I didnt convert the songs it just wouldnt be worth it.
Even without degrading the signal by having [nearly] any analog signal chain, you're still using your crappy consumer audio card's DAC (and subsequently, ADC) in that process, then recompressing it at a different sample rate. Groooooooooss! I'll stick with buying the vinyl and downloading the audio from [semi-] illicit services, thanks.
--- What
This service doesn't provide free anything. It is trialware and from the descriptions, it sounds like crapware.
"If God had wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates." - Jay Leno
One Temple university student was quoted as saying "Like it is so shady man, I mean here we have all these free grooves that musicians create, and the man wants to put DRM on it, like its so republican man"
So how hard is it to get into Temple? Geeze, I've heard more insightful commentary from a 6th grader.
NOTE: I'm not trying to make fun of Temple, I'm making fun of college students in general.
I guess we've seen enough by now to realise that 'Big Music' are never going to change their tune (yes it's a bad pun, sorry!)
They can only relate to people, collectively, in terms of captive markets with no choice but to buy what they're given. Offering things "for free" was clearly their idea of a clever scheme to get people to buy into DRM and crade-to-grave renting of top 40 hits.
It's quite a while since I was on a University campus but there was always quite a lot of live music available, just a short walk away. It might not always be very good but you see these things differently when you're younger.
And when I was there your friends were the pre-electronic forerunner of the "If you like X you'll probably like Y services." it's a time when you find out that you like a lot of different music to what your expected and the awful shock that your best friends hate some of your favourite bands.
We were told it was the evil cassette that was going to bring down civilisation and force hard drinking record executives to work. Or was that the other way around? The sky still hasn't fallen, they make even more money now. But more money will never be enough for them.
Ame
No, see, the F/OSS approach will be more along the rational and logical lines of pointing out that you:
A) should quit whining and fix it yourself already, since you already have the source,
B) are an idiot (doubly so if what you needed is related in any way to user interface, reading existing files, etc). We should have mandatory IQ tests to prevent idiots like you from getting anywhere near a computer,
C) should RTFM already. In fact, you should write the RTFM, since it doesn't exist yet. Get to it already.
D) are an idiot
E) are a MS fanboy and/or paid to call their favourite program crap
F) are an idiot. Even by MS shill/fanboy/etc standards.
G) should stop doing anything that can't be done with their program. In fact, you should feel _proud_ to abandon any work you need done, or spend a few months learning command-line ways to do it, just to show the middle finger to MS.
H) are an idiot for needing that, or for doing it like that, in the first place
I) are only using a closed-source program instead because you've pirated it. We just know you did.
J) did we mention that you're an idiot yet?
K) all the above
L) like K, and you're an idiot too
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
How many hits from the cluestick does it take? Make it usable and people will, amazing as it sounds, use it.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
"If you disagree with that philosophy then at least have the courage of your convictions to just not buy it"
Sorry, you're some idiot from pennsylvania. You don't get to make any rules. You're a whiner, and nobody cares what you think. In fact, you get so little self respect, your wife is cheating on you as you're reading this. She doesn't play by your rules either. You don't make rules for anybody, not even yourself.
Seriously, ask your wife (if she doesn't dump you between now and tonight) if she regrets marrying. I'll bet it will be an interesting answer one way or the other.
It reminds me of the MPAA ads before a DVD I rented the other day:
:-P
Would you steal a car? Would you steal a purse? Would you steal a cellphone? Then why would you steal a movie?
No, I wouldn't steal a car. But if I could magically make an exact duplicate of the car, leaving the original intact and available to it's owner, damn right I would copy it. Same for the cellphone, money, etc.
What will happen to copyright law when the Jetson's style cloning machine becomes reality?
Whaaaaat???? You mean that there are universities out there that are using tax payer and student money to buy services that students don't want? Next you will be saying that there are entire businesses that exist just to sell universities crap that they don't need.
In the USA, universities have all the baggage that comes with being large corporations as well as being government organizations like the pentagon who would never buy a hammer off the shelf when they can buy one for $500...
Take academic publishing for example. Part of the job description of may professors is that they publish articles in their field. However, in order to get published in academic journals you usually have to 1)join the crappy organization that puts out the journal and 2) subscribe to the journal. Then, 3) you have to give the journal copyright on your article. Now, in most cases, the journals will then sell access to their articles to article databases like ebsco or whatever. Then universities have to pay to subscribe to those databases. Think about that. Universities are paying people to write articles and then have to turn around and pay to get access to those very same articles. If that isn't a scam I don't know what is. (Sure the univerities are paying to get access to the work of thousands and thousands of articles that are written by people not at that university, but the fact remains they are paying twice, no matter how little, to get the articles...)
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
the letters themseleves don't exist as letters.
On the side of the JEC which faces the football field has or at least used to have concrete tiles of varying shades. Every year that I was there, every couple weeks a group of students would make a word or two by rearranging the tiles into letters.
In the late 90's somebody arranged them into a big quake symbol.
Also people would put stuff up in the CII windows too. A big RPI bullet was there at the end of the school year.
When I was at campus a few months ago, I was please to see that a few of our JoeMaMa! stickes were still about (which look very similar to the 125 anniversary stickers.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
you went to a community college... didn't you... Chris?
It's too bad Apple are so stringent with their pricing, or they could work out great deals with Unis that people wouldn't hate so much.
Do you know how difficult it has been for Steve Jobs to negotiate the price down to just $0.99? I'm sure he would like to reduce the price even further to get more market share from allofmp3, but the RIAA complain. When you have an artifical government enforced monopoly, you get to choose the price of your songs. No-one else, not even Apple, can force you to reduce the prices, even if Apple knows that keeping them so high is dumb. Personally I think they have done an excellent job in implementing their service and their price is not that bad (although obviously I will not be buying from them).
You're putting the blame in the wrong place.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312013493/104-85 97344-0175904?v=glance&n=283155
7 218
The use of stealing to mean copying information predates your existence on this planet. It was in use in the 50s. Stop trying to pretend it is others trying to redefine the language.
Did you moan about the identity theft article on slashdot last week?
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/04/23
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
radiohead stopped being interesting when thom yorke became a rock star. he could record himself taking a crap and it'd go platinum...his solo album? terrible.
they have the same curse that Black Flag did in the 80's, mainly that they change styles so often that their fans can't catch their breath.
A minority of college students have unusual tastes in music; most IME listen to the same radio stations everyone else does. The problem is that the mainstream types are already very well-served by Direct Connect or MyTunes/OurTunes and the eclectic or unusual types, who would probably be more inclined to use something like Napster, can't find what they want. Not only that, but a lot of people like to listen to music on their iPods, so why would they use a music service that's free if it's also a hassle? They wouldn't, of course, which makes me think that most of these efforts come at the behest of clueless administrators rather than the students themselves.
You probably have CTrax because the RIAA has threatened to sue colleges over student file sharing. $150,000 statutory damages per willful infringment (read: copy), times 10,000 students, times 1000 copied songs per student = a $1.5 trillion lawsuit. Much cheaper to license CTracks for a couple million per year and call it RIAA insurance that to risk losing a suit that would bankrupt the school (and the whole state government if it's public).
0 1 - just my two bits
I don't really use P2P networks because I just don't have the desire for tons of music. Maybe I'm just weird. That would explain my addiction to /.
Funtime Candy Wow! - my plan for eventually conquering Japan.
Ever heard of the concept?
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
Tea, Earl Grey, hot.
And exactly how many of those get a cut when I buy a copy of Abbey Road which was made over FIFTY years ago?
Most of them are DEAD man-- I wish my heirs would get paid for the rest of time for the work I do every day.
I support a reasonable copyright period. The current copyright period is not reasonable.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Yeah, free like roads are free. It's kind of like that free Microsoft software I got from my school. Oh, wait, what's this tuition increase about?
Here at the unviersity of Toronto, we have free access to streaming audio from the "Naxos Music Library" (www.naxosmusiclibrary.com), although it's not well publicized outside of the music dept.. I use this service a lot--why? because it has.. *drumroll*.. music that is HARD to find on bitorrent, shareaza, etc.! i haven't gotten around to deciding on a method of ripping the streams however ;-)
I don't have a link, but there are 50s newsreels of the Rosenbergs using the word theft. I did notice the book was written in 1987, I didn't have another source handy. I personally existed well before 1987 and can tell you that the word theft in application to the Rosenbergs was in heavy rotation before this book came out.
Stealing cable existed in the 70s.
And again, there's that "identity theft" sticky thing for you. No one lost anything there, something was just duped.
You're in denial.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
March 8th, 1951.
s enbergs/mar81951.pdf
http://cms.westport.k12.ct.us/cmslmc/resources/ro
"The Government told a jury in Federal Court here yesterday that it would produce evidence that the three defendents in this nation's first atom bomb spy trial had conspired to steal and deliver to the Soviet Union "the one weapon that might well hold the key to the survival of this nation and the peace of the world - the atomic bomb"."
"Theft of Secrets Charged"
Your efforts to define the English language to exclude ideas you don't like (a particular form of theft) is Orwellian in itself.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I have long believed that "free with restrictions" is less valuable than "paid for with no restrictions"
This story appears to support this assertion.
I know I'd rather use emusic.com, for example, than itunes at any price. Anyone else?
While it seems that long ago, try 37.
<grrr
Good catch.
I only knew 50 years was coming up soon on some of the beatle's albums because they are lobbying to extend the british copyright laws so they would not go public domain. Looks like it is "please, please me" that is the album.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
"...extend the copyright laws so they would not go public domain" ?!?
/>
The fsck you say. What freedom-loving country could ever do such a thing?
< grrr
Heck,
How would I know. But they are reporting it on BBC.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4724664.stm
So... my KARMA rating is excellent but I no longer get a Karma bonus for it.
And there appears to be no way to fix it. I guess I will just set up a new ID at some point or go to DIGG.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
My school (University of Washington Seattle) also has free Napster. The only person I know who uses it is the guy who got a free Dell DJ and Napster subscription (the kind where you can place the songs on a player and they don't expire when you leave school). I tried it for a while, and found several things: The free collection - as far as college students are concerned - is a pretty small subset of their total collection. Their software is incredibly poorly written, becoming pointlessly slow and rather unstable if you, for example, try to play an audio stream and download a file at the same time. Their interface is sub-par, with limited sorting capabilities, kind of lame search, and general clunkiness. It was a waste of RAM and disk space. It tried to make a few unexpected modifications to my system, like changing audio file associations.
I once explained all this to some people who were out in front of the HUB asically wondering why nobody used the service. Their response was remarkably similar to AOHell's (from one time that I had to cancel a free trial subscription); they didn't want me to go away, they couldn't believe I didn't like the junk they offered, they kep repeating themselves as if it would convince me or I'd mis-spoken the first time, and they were useless about questions like "Is there some way to use the service without using your software?"
I don't agree with pirating, but I can sure see why so many more people use DC++.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Give every US citizen free music but survey what gets listened to. Then divide a big pile of money into a % for every artist.