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Music Media Businesses Education IT

Dell and Napster Going Directly to Colleges 196

Posted by Zonk from the like-back-in-the-day dept.
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."
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Dell and Napster Going Directly to Colleges More

Dell and Napster Going Directly to Colleges

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  • Takes 1 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by turtled ( 845180 ) on Thursday July 07, 2005 @10:58AM (#13003577)
    "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.
    • It just takes one student sys admin with access to the whole freaking library, and there you have it, piracy at it's best.

      Isn't that how Napster works anyway? i.e. All you can slurp for a flat rate monthly fee? Stealing it and redistributing it across the campus (which may actually be slightly more difficult due to DRM) would only convince Napster to pull out and leave students to fend for themselves.
      • would only convince Napster to pull out and leave students to fend for themselves.

        And the downside is??

        • And the downside is??

          The college again starts restricting access, expelling students, and other Bad Things(TM) because they don't want legal trouble from the RIAA.
          • The college again starts restricting access, expelling students, and other Bad Things(TM) because they don't want legal trouble from the RIAA.

            That's pretty much how the school is going to operate towards illegal downloading regardless of whether or not they offer Napster.
    • 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 don't see what good a crapload of DRM'd WMA files are going to do anyone. Actually, Napster and the school probably wouldn't care if the students are sharing the WMA files. They are only going to play on the student's computers that have Napster anyway, and if the students copy the files from their friends then it will actually save bandwidth.

  • This won't help (Score:4, Insightful)

    by thundercatslair ( 809424 ) on Thursday July 07, 2005 @10:58AM (#13003579)
    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.
    • 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.

      Napster's subscription service streams the music, so this most certainly would help bandwidth issues. Also, I imagine new hit songs see a lot of downloads when they are released, so this could help even if most users aren't on the subscription plan.

    • well, the peer-2-server-2-peer model that napster uses is horribly inefficient (at least this was how napster used to work). p2p technology could really reduce the network usage if it optimizes the peer list to prefer local network sources.

      This sounds like a way for napster to use an inefficient distribution model to help dell sell more servers to people with large wallets.

    • This doesn't count for people who have lived in areas without broadband, or under the thumb of parents that don't allow illegal downloads and such.

      So, they get to college, and download like mad.

      Sounds fringe, but I see it often.

    • Re:This won't help (Score:2, Interesting)

      by raolin ( 512968 )
      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 goin
    • I also don't think it will help. I object because it's such a special-purpose solution.

      I would much rather see a more general-purpose distributed caching mechanism for large files. It might seem like just an aesthetic consideration now, but in the future it might mean the difference between being able to download a movie from any rental service, and having to use the one from your local cable company / ISP, because locally caching huge files like movies could save so much bandwidth.

    • Re:This won't help (Score:3, Insightful)

      by slashrogue ( 775436 )
      Certainly by "almost everyone" you are referring to some specific demographic of which a majority "has their base music collection built by now." There will forever be people that are "just now" getting into music or new types of music and wanting to get their ears on everything they can. I personally have bought maybe 3 CDs in the past 3 years. I don't download music either, I just haven't been interested. But if I had the money and the time and the inclination, there is a whole host of music that I'd

  • Illegal downloading? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mopslik ( 688435 ) on Thursday July 07, 2005 @10:58AM (#13003580)

    The solution will alleviate network bottlenecks caused by illegal music downloads...

    Funny, I thought that uploading (sharing) copyrighted music files was the illegal part.

    • Funny, I thought that uploading (sharing) copyrighted music files was the illegal part.

      Folks who upload large numbers of files attract attention and are more likely to be caught and prosecuted/sued. Yet, that does not mean that freely downloading and using copyrighted material is legal.

      • Well, I'm a Canuck, so I'm not 100% aware of the US's legal system. Is there really a law prohibiting "downloading" an artist's work? Again, I was under the impression that the uploader was violating the terms of the copyright clause, i.e. "do not share or reproduce".

        Perhaps it falls under a similar "library" clause? For example, many books have notices reading "you are permitted to use this for $SOME_PURPOSE only..." Is this the case?
    • No, it's just that only the uploaders are worth suing -- since without them, the whole operation fails.

  • In my experience... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by yellowbkpk ( 890493 ) * on Thursday July 07, 2005 @10:58AM (#13003582)
    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.

  • Napsters database? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by FrontalLobe ( 897758 )
    So... what about people who like good music?

  • Minimal Effect In My Opinion (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Evil W1zard ( 832703 ) on Thursday July 07, 2005 @11:00AM (#13003600) Journal
    "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.
    • What's your current budget for online music today ?
      Agreed, with more songs per $ you would have more songs, but why would you give more $ for music than you already do ?

      If you're spending $5 per month buying music - and downloading the rest - sure going 100% legal would need cheaper songs. But if you're spending $0, I guess it's not enough to lower prices.

      If the massive scale download you are talking about is more than 50 songs/month on a sustained basis, then you should consider the all you can eat per m
  • 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.

    • Re:Universities should embrace Common Carrier stat (Score:4, Informative)

      by Holi ( 250190 ) on Thursday July 07, 2005 @11:48AM (#13004094)
      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.
      • 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.

    • right here [theregister.co.uk]

      The Register sees this an RIAA tax imposed on the students at large.

  • The mindset of a typical University Admin. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by everphilski ( 877346 ) on Thursday July 07, 2005 @11:02AM (#13003617) Journal
    True story.
    I used to be a resident advisor at UAH [uah.edu]. 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-

    • Re:The mindset of a typical University Admin. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by zoomba ( 227393 ) <mfc131.gmail@com> on Thursday July 07, 2005 @11:19AM (#13003763) Homepage
      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.
      • 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).
      • Even so, my school (Duke University) has had tremendous success by making it clear that all students get an outbound data allotment of 5GB/day and leaving it up to students to control their own use.

        If you go over the limit, you get a warning email. Get a few warning emails, and you get your outbound connection throttled or even cut off for the remainder of the semester. Works great, keeps the geeks happy, and is simple for people to understand.
    • I am a college admin and I understand both sides to this issue. I have taken the stance that I only implement policies set by administration.

      IMHO my job is to point out the options (with risks, costs, etc) and let the people in charge decide. I do not want to be part of an IT dept that is always seen as saying No.

      In a perfect world everyone would be able to do whatever they want. Guess what? The world ain't perfect but we can keep trying.
    • Sounds like the thinking of the network admin at my old university. He heard there was an AIM exploit that took 10 minutes to do. So like clockwork everyones AIM client would disconnect every 9 minutes or so. This went on for about a week. I'm glad ccs had their own network and that I could tunnel through it.

  • Hmmm... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Geshiggity ( 897983 )
    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.
    • 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,

  • Shrinking bandwith to prevent illegal downloads... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Arthur B. ( 806360 ) on Thursday July 07, 2005 @11:03AM (#13003627)
    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.
    • 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 [gotdns.com] 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 s [uiuc.edu]
    • 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.

  • Cornell and Napster (Score:4, Interesting)

    by karvind ( 833059 ) <karvind.gmail@com> on Thursday July 07, 2005 @11:05AM (#13003643) Journal
    Cornell had (2004-2005) a pilot program [cornell.edu] where Napster services were provided free to the students. At that time it was supported by corporate sponsors and gifts fund in Student and Academic Services.

    And the way it saved bandwidth (obvious) was by using a local caching server.

    • University of Rochester had (2004-2005) a pilot program [rochester.edu] 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).
  • 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 thei

  • iTMS (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kebes ( 861706 ) on Thursday July 07, 2005 @11:09AM (#13003677) Journal
    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!)

  • And? (Score:3, Funny)

    by samael ( 12612 ) <Andrew@Ducker.org.uk> on Thursday July 07, 2005 @11:10AM (#13003683) Homepage
    "Hardware vendor sells file cache" is hardly a big deal.
  • Dell went directly to AMD and got some decent processors.

  • fine line between stupid and dumb (Score:3, Interesting)

    by timothy ( 36799 ) on Thursday July 07, 2005 @11:12AM (#13003701) Journal
    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

    • It would be because colleges only have so much bandwidth going off campus, and doing something like this make lives of people downloading a lot easier than simply throttling bandwidth.

      To use your chocolate example: Imagine a college only had one entrance to the school. A large fraction of the student body is using that sole entrance to go down the street to the convience store to buy chocolate. This is happening so much, that it limits the ability of commuters and professors getting to and from the sch

  • Competition for Ruckus Network (Score:3, Informative)

    by Bimo_Dude ( 178966 ) <[bimoslash] [at] [theness.org]> on Thursday July 07, 2005 @11:17AM (#13003755) Homepage Journal
    It looks like this could be competition for Ruckus Network [ruckus.com], which provides a file-sharing service to [some] universities and colleges.

  • It's a nice idea... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by quadra23 ( 786171 )
    ...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 f
    • 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.

      The bandwidth problem is the school's limited connection to the rest of the internet. Most schools could care less about the internal LAN bandwidth, as there is usually more than plenty to spare (barring any nasty worm infections).

  • And similarly... (Score:5, Funny)

    by base_chakra ( 230686 ) * on Thursday July 07, 2005 @11:26AM (#13003832)
    Forbes is reporting on the teaming of the RIAA and the Yakuza to go directly to college campuses and start slapping people around.

  • Dont blame it all on the music (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rerunn ( 181278 ) on Thursday July 07, 2005 @11:31AM (#13003901)
    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.

  • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 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 "educati

  • Recently integrated (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SpiritGod21 ( 884402 ) on Thursday July 07, 2005 @11:44AM (#13004039) Homepage
    My campus (Southwest Missouri State University [smsu.edu]) 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.
  • 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.

  • Not going to work (Score:2, Informative)

    by M trotsky ( 896746 )
    They're running a similar program at UM College Park http://www.oit.umd.edu/projects/musicservice// [umd.edu]
    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.

  • Internet Access... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by MaxPowerDJ ( 888947 )
    ... 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.
  • I go to Elon University [elon.edu] and they have a partnership with Apple in sharing songs purchased through iTunes on the campus network. It's been really great for the students, and illegal downloading has slowed quite a bit (from people I talk to, at least).

    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 mos

  • As far as I know, the way that Napster works is you pay a certain amount of money per month to get infinite downloads. Once you stop paying money, the music you downloaded stops working. Um, based on this info, it sounds like Dell and Napster are trying to find a base of people that will pay money in perpetuity to keep the thousands of songs that they downloaded.

    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

  • I don't like this at all.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by The Lynxpro ( 657990 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [orpxnyl]> on Thursday July 07, 2005 @12:26PM (#13004547)

    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.

  • - 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 americ

  • You want to shift to legal downloads? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RapmasterT ( 787426 ) on Thursday July 07, 2005 @01:21PM (#13005223)
    It's not rocket science.

    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.

    • $5 a CD, .50 a song. Piracy will blow away like dust in the wind, and profits will soar like never before.

      I agree with this. Unfortunately, there's one little problem (from the RIAA's point of view)... if we sell you a song for $.50 you might turn around and give a copy away to someone else! That must be prevented at all costs as that would result in a lost sale!

      So that $.50 song will need to be equipped with the very latest in DRM. There, now it can only be played on the one computer it was purchase

    • the better solution is a massive warez server in each dorm with a cross server request system to keep outgoing and intra-building bandwith usage down, I volunteered this service for a year back at binghamton university and it was rather popular among those who knew about it >:)
  • 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.)
    (Sound

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