After years of legal battles and heated disagreements regarding the downloading of copyrighted music online, the controversial issue is now taking center stage in the university scene.
Penn State University, for example, is trying to tackle the problem legally with the aid of music industry moguls.
The university has made a deal with reborn Napster that will allow students to download music freely starting in January of 2004.
Beginning next semester, Penn State students living in residence halls will take part in a pilot program that will allow them to download from a music library of more than 500,000 songs for free. The university is taking this action as a result of the increased illegal activities, mainly by college students who download from services such as KaZaA.
“We’ve talked with our students and they’ve let us know that music access is important to them,” Bill Mahon, assistant vice president for university relations at Penn State, said.
Mahon added that the university already provides services in their dorms such as free newspapers and cable, so this seemed a logical next step in today’s advancing technology.
“Students have been showing strong support, along with members of Congress,” Mahon said.
While downloading the songs is free, students will only be allowed to keep the files on up to three computers, and burning the songs onto CD will cost 99 cents per song.
The funding for the program will come out of the $160 information technology fee each student pays every year.
Some have expressed opposition to this plan, however, targeting the system’s funding.
The University of Wisconsin, for example, considered such a program for UW residence halls, but did not find enough support and reason to go through with it.
“If we did this here with the IT fee, we would have to cut funds to something else. Would you be willing to give up a computer lab or training for the ability to download songs that you can’t even copy?” UW Director of Housing Paul Evans said.
Along with the question of funding, Evans added that student support is not strong enough to implement a similar system at UW.
To have a legal file system at the UW would mean an increase in housing fees for such services as cable or Internet access.
Evans said he sees the music downloading issue and the ensuing actions as a result of the changing times.
“The real problem is that the recording industry is so far behind technology,” Evans said.
Penn State students are also showing mixed emotions toward the new system.
“There are two schools of thought from students — those who want to jump on board and those who are questioning if it’s really necessary,” Penn State Student Government President Ian Rosenberger said.
When asked about the funding, Rosenberger said students would not even notice the cuts that will be made as a result of the new system.
“I’m not sure if students realize that it’s like an 83,000 student-large focus group,” Rosenberger said of the pilot program.
Considering the outcome of the program at Penn State, university officials said they are positive that many other universities will follow their lead in one way or another, especially considering the increased legal actions being taken by Congress regarding illegal downloading.
“In two to three years, schools will all use something like this,” Mahon said.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, however, has opted to take an alternate course to downloading music, but has met legal opposition from many music industry groups.
After a year of hard work and waiting, students at MIT were given access to the Library Access to Music Project, a project that allowed students to listen to legal digital music through an online radio-like program.
Within hours of its unveiling, however, music companies and copyright specialists expressed their discontent with the service, resulting in the shutdown of LAMP.
Although MIT says they had proper licenses, the service is now suspended while licenses with record labels are being discussed.
The two MIT students who created the program, Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel, said that they had hired Loudeye, a private company, to not only fill a hard drive with music, but also to make sure that the music licenses were in order. This apparently was not the case, though.
“After the LAMP service was launched, Loudeye informed us that some of their assurances to us may have been mistaken,” a statement released by MIT stated.
The statement also said that MIT will work to get the program back up.
“We are temporarily suspending the LAMP service while we pursue clarifying discussions with Loudeye and the record labels and music publishers,” the statement said. “MIT continues to be committed to developing a fully-licensed service.”