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Music Media The Internet

Rochester Signs Napster Deal, Hosts P2P Panel 123

Posted by simoniker from the university-fun-and-games dept.
extra88 writes "Following in Penn State's footsteps, the University of Rochester has struck a deal to provide access to Napster's premium service for dormitory residents. From the press release: 'In addition, Napster and the University's prestigious Eastman School of Music will be developing ways in which Napster can begin to provide original content from Eastman students and faculty to service members across the entire Napster network.' What does this mean? Perhaps not coincidentally, the university is also hosting a panel discussion about P2P file sharing on Feb. 16. Cary Sherman from the RIAA, university administrators and others will be on the panel and there is to be a live audio stream of the event."
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Rochester Signs Napster Deal, Hosts P2P Panel More

Rochester Signs Napster Deal, Hosts P2P Panel

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  • uh (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @04:08AM (#8186930) Homepage
    and tuitions are rising because what? its too expensive for students to buy music in the regular market so now its just included as a tax in their tuition???
    • The music services that charge per song are never going to take off. Users simply do not want to pay $1 for every song they download. This is for several reasons.

      First off, You are downloading a digital file, It's not the same as going to the store and purchasing a CD in a case and getting something physical out of it.

      Any person would much rather go to the store, probably get a better price, and get a hard copy of it. Not some proprietary music format that you'll loose the next week because your sibling

      • Re:uh (Score:2)

        by tunah ( 530328 )
        The music services that charge per song are never going to take off.


        Um, I think you missed the boat on that one - iTunes has sold more than 30 million songs.

    • Re:uh (Score:2)

      by danila ( 69889 )
      They are experimenting. If students do not like the service, this will be cancelled. You can't find out what is good without risking mistakes.
      • Here's the problem, from the perspective of a recent UR graduate:

        College students are cheap. They are going to download free music off the net one way or another. For better or worse, it's been a fact since the day mp3 and broadband both became available. ftp, irc, usenet, napster, it doesn't matter.

        BUT.. The university will say "use this! it's free!" and the students will, instead of using Kazaa or DC or whatever else. New students come in every year and don't know square 1 about computers, but they see
        • >> The University should not be spending the
          >> money on this

          Have you looked at the big picture? Napster servers for these schools are located on campus and owned by Napster. When accessing the Napster service, students are not pulling songs over the net, they're pulling them from a local server saving oodles of bandwidth.
          • The school has two T1 lines. They've had two T1 lines for ages, and haven't ever even thought about getting a third. The second isn't even turned on, it's just there for backup. That means that they aren't going to turn it off, either.

            500,000 songs, 4MB a song, that's... 2TB of storage? Are you sure that they're kept on a local server? I admit I haven't done my homework on this, but that sounds a little ridiculous to me.

            Not to mention the fact that newly released (or licensed) songs will have to be downlo
            • Just two T1s. Wow. RIT is right next door and has orders of magnitude more bandwidth than that. Granted it's also a much larger school.
              • The Rochester Institute of TECHNOLOGY uses more bandwith than a, mainly, medical and engineering school? You don't say... I don't know how accurate the original figures were, but it wouldn't surprise me that RIT uses allot more bandwith than the U of R.
                • Yeah. Sigh, if only it was used for something useful. ITS claims that something ike 60-70% of traffic is just stupid P2P stuff.

            • The school has two T1 lines. They've had two T1 lines for ages, and haven't ever even thought about getting a third.

              Last I heard, UR has 2 oc-3 connections now and the backup line is a t3 that isn't on normally. So,that opens things up a bit for this whole idea of the Napster servers being on-site and downloading new content (maybe at like 6-8am when the fewest students are using their computers?). If there are 10 albums added every week, 15 songs per album, 4MB per song, that's still only 600MB/wk.

            • >> 500,000 songs, 4MB a song, that's... 2TB of
              >> storage? Are you sure that they're kept on a
              >> local server? I

              2TB isn't a huge number anymore for a server, my home gaming machine has 1TB. Remember these are the servers previously owned by MP3.com

              Regardless of how many T1 lines, the school also likely pays for traffic on those lines, additionl traffic = additional bandwidth costs.

              Also PenState has their own server on campus, for those users at the school they can connect to Napster and
      • They are free to experiment as much as they like, as long as they don't pass the cost of these experiments on to the students' parents, by raising the tuition fees. I am not too pleased with the idea of coughing up extra dough so that my son's roommate can download some crap he calls music.

    • its too expensive for students to buy music in the regular market so now its just included as a tax in their tuition???

      The music industry is very good at taxing the citizens. They have taxes on blank CDs, hard drives (in Canada and Europe), and now in Internet streaming. I would suggest that people boycott solely on this tactic. This is should've been dealt with under the RICO statutes. Not to mention all the extra stuff you have to pay for in the electronics and computer goods you buy (DRM chips, sign

    • Yup.

      It seems that there a lot of unelected people out there who have decided that they will decide who we will be giving our money to. Buy a PC, some of your money will go to Microsoft, attend a uni, some of that will go to the RIAA members.

    • I'm a current student at the UR so I get first hand experience with this service. Or at least I would if I owned a PC. The software only works on a PC and not on my Mac. And since I graduate next May, I won't be around if they decide to support Mac users. So I get the joy of a tuition hike without any of the benefits of this hike! I love paying money for nothing.

      I like the idea of letting people from Eastman share their music, I would just like to be able to use a service that I am paying for.

  • Political and practical... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @04:11AM (#8186941) Journal
    I suppose it makes sense for a school of music to embrace Napster, it's not as though they'll have nothing to offer. Presumably they're paying Napster here though, so perhaps they intend to make some of the money back via their "developed services".

    I reckon this is probably a move on two fronts though - first it prevents the College being sued because it's officially above-board. Second, it establishes the college as a "happening" place - it's not just teaching string quartet music, it's working with new media in new ways. All very attractive to potential students...

    Simon

  • A Hope Beyond a Hope (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fallout2man ( 689436 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @04:12AM (#8186943)
    I seriously hope someone at this panel makes the RIAA look like the fools they are. Suing their user-base, charging ridiculous prices, forcing draconian DRM (in non US countries) on people, and stiffing the artist.

    And yet they wonder why they have such a piracy epidemic on their hands? Someone really needs to say/do something at the event to make a spectacle of the RIAA and how ridiculous what they're saying and doing is.

  • Cool (Score:5, Funny)

    by macshune ( 628296 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @04:12AM (#8186944) Journal
    So now they can get legit music if they can't find what they want on kazaa?:) It must be nice to get something with the ~$700/month dorm fees other than closet-sized room and a lumpy mattress.

  • RIAA (Score:1)

    by Dak_x ( 632526 )
    I think people will be willing to pay a resonable price for there music. Does this mean the RIAA is finally starting to get the message? Hopefully the future of technology and file swaping will bring us a future of direct music distribution without the RIAA... Heres hoping..
  • I hear Penn State students are using iTunes predominantly, which makes sense seeing as it works with the iPod.
    • That makes RIAA twice as happy. They get paid for unused Napster accounts, and get paid for iTunes songs! What a deal. Way to stick it to The Man, eh?

    • iTunes 4 LAN music sharing ability basically puts all local music in one pot, for listening if not burning... and it's free. Apparently this feature is extremely popular on college campuses right now.

      Ah, I wish I was still in college, as I'd love to been able to peruse my classmate's music libraries. At the very least it would have made it way easier to differentiate between the cute girls, and the cute girls with really good taste in music.

      ~jeff

    • i currently go to penn state, and, though many people do use iTunes, less and less have been using it as of late, as evidenced by the number of shared libraries in iTunes. I believe this is due to the fact that napster provides free streaming music, which can only be listened at your computer. otherwise songs are $.99 per download (in .WMA format! YUCK!).

      Also, as a mac user on campus, i am still technically paying for the use of napster, despite the fact that i have no way of using it at all. This t

  • I wonder (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Raul654 ( 453029 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @04:14AM (#8186953) Homepage
    there is to be a live audio stream of the event

    You think they'll have to pay CARP?
    • ...there is to be a live audio stream of the event...

      You think they'll have to pay CARP?
      They should [copyright.gov], at least the Business Establishment fee. It would be legally interesting if they didn't...

  • uneccessary (Score:5, Insightful)

    by facts ( 257980 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @04:15AM (#8186954)
    It's a shame that an educational institution has to make a deal with a corporation to sate the appetitie of the RIAA's lawyers. I'm guessing the cost of this will eventually be passed onto students if they approve the service. Why don't they just pay for all you can watch movies too?

  • What does Napster have to do with P2P? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hanssprudel ( 323035 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @04:16AM (#8186955)
    Why do people keep thinking that the new Napster has something to do with P2P?

    Yes, I know the answer: "Because that is what the DRM peddlers wanted them to think, which is why they bought the trademark. But at universities and especially here on Slashdot I think we can expect a little more.

    What the schools are doing when they sign deals with the new Napster is to drive their students into the acceptance of proprietary, Windows only, closed, locked, DMCA protected file formats that you better not even think about trying to port to your operating system of choice. What they are doing is welcoming into their campuses the future where the devices we use to communicate are not tools tools for freedom, but chains designed to control us. It is the equivalent of putting out a press release that all the dorms have now installed the new "Trusted door" technology, which will only let students out of their dorms when they have a valid reason to do it (I mean, you can't trust students - we know that - so why not have trusted doors instead???)

    Stop lauding this. Stop cheering it on. Fight it at every turn. Do not sign up. Do not give them your money. Shout as loudly as you can, at anyone involved, that you will start spending money on music again when it is sold to you, rather then given in some fucked up form of leasing where you own the computer, the law prevents you from figuring out how it works.

    Linux is dead in the DRM future. The open web is dead in the DRM future. Everything this site celebrates has no chance of survival when the Internet has become a centralized entity of information control. We have to draw the line HERE because we are the only ones who can. Every time we mention these serives in a positive light we are sowing the seeds of our destruction.

    I'll stop now. ARGGG.
    • Do not give them your money.

      The fee will be added to your tuition. You don't really get a say in this.

      Linux is dead in the DRM future. The open web is dead in the DRM future.

      I don't think anyone would notice. If you see what people really want [google.com], you will undertand why a $40 billion dollar industry controls a $400 billion one.

    • It is the equivalent of putting out a press release that all the dorms have now installed the new "Trusted door" technology, which will only let students out of their dorms when they have a valid reason to do it (I mean, you can't trust students - we know that - so why not have trusted doors instead???)

      The parents who actually pay the tuition bills might think that Trusted Door Technology is a great idea: it guarantees that their child isn't getting into trouble, with no interacton on their part. (doesn't

    • What does Napster have to do with P2P?

      Duh. It, like iTunes, BuyMusic, etc., is a legal service which is trying to supplant the illegal distribution of music via P2P protocols. It, like iTunes, BuyMusic, etc., does not use P2P protocols in its service. We all know this, you are not +1 Informative.

      I don't see anyone here "lauding" or "cheering this on." I certainly don't think these Napster deals at universities are a good idea.
    • I wonder if there is a way for students to 'exempt' from paying the portion of thier tuition that goes to Napster. Like opting out of PRIG ?
  • I attend, Rochester Institute of Tech(RIT), which happens to be 10-15 mins from U of R, and our faculty has just been "discussing" the idea of dealing with Napster. I didn't think U of R would come out of nowhere and beat us to the punch like that. First they cap our bandwidth, then we get upstaged by some liberal school to the west! :(
    • I went to Rochester. It is certianly not liberal in comarison to places like Emory. I agree that RIT is more blue collar and down to earth.
    • The Provost of the university has gotten involved at the national level in disussions of peer-to-peer file sharing [rochester.edu]. This draws attention from companies like Napster and indicates he's interested hearing about their service.

      Don't worry, UofR still doesn't have email aliases (the address you get is the address you get), single sign-on (like RIT's DCE), or university web servers that are actually useful to students doing anything beyond static HTML.
      • Don't worry, UofR still doesn't have email aliases (the address you get is the address you get), single sign-on (like RIT's DCE), or university web servers that are actually useful to students doing anything beyond static HTML.

        Back in the early 90's when I attended UR, one of the nice things was that they had a very good computing resource/student ratio. They didn't have the best or most equipment, but I pretty quickly got access to pretty much anything and everything I wanted. Email aliases or anythin

        • Email aliases or anything else was not a problem, I had root access on a good number of the machines on the network.

          Maybe you're the reason the Unix group is so paranooid ;)
          • Maybe you're the reason the Unix group is so paranooid ;)

            :-)

            That's the first move I made. I cozied up to the Unix group, and eventually became the student TA. It was definately a very different group back then though. But then again, the whole Internet was different back in those days. I remember lobbying them to switch Uhura to use to DNS instead of /etc/hosts.

      • You seem misinformed. The web servers have php.
        • www.rochester.edu has PHP, mail.rochester.edu, the only university server students have accounts on, doesn't. At RIT, students have their home directories on www.rit.edu where they can use SSL, use their own CGIs, in addition to PHP. I'm not really a web guy so I don't know what else is there but it's pretty useful. I suppose the UR answer would be "use CIF," I don't know what it's like being on their server.
          • I suppose the UR answer would be "use CIF".

            Well you can probably blame me for that. Back in '92 or so, the UCC (they're called something else now, ACS maybe?) were starting to lock down what users could do on the main campus servers. Since I was the CIF SysAdmin at the time, I worked a deal to get them to give us their just decommissioned Sun 3/260 in exchange for setting up accounts for the general student population to 'fool around' outside of their servers. They accepted, and after that point when an

    • um... when did they start capping our bandwidth? Last year, the outbound internet1 was constantly saturated (by about 10 students running FTP servers or whatever), so it may have seemed capped, but it wasn't technically. I could also download from RIT at 300K/sec from my cable modem in buffalo last year (probably more a limitation of the cable than RIT). If that's capped, then I'll take capped any day.

      (and technically, UofR is to the northeast)
    • We also have actual females.

  • Won't make a dent in Kazaa Usage (Score:5, Informative)

    by use_compress ( 627082 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @04:16AM (#8186960) Journal
    On napster, you can only get semi commerical/commercial music. The average college student demands far more for a file sharing service. With high speed access, the tempation is still there to download movies/software/porn which can't be done on Napster. While the students are downloading movies/software/porn, what would stop them from picking up a few tunes along the way?

  • Still $0.99 a Song for Them (Score:5, Informative)

    by the1brian ( 595032 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @04:17AM (#8186963)
    "Permanent downloads--to burn to CDs or transfer to any of 60 portable music devices--can be purchased for 99 cents each or $9.95 for an album."

    They will get access to the Streams (whoop dee doo), which are the equivalent of radio, or shoutcast. It does also say though that they can download locally an unlimitted amount of songs though, so maybe they just can't burn or transfer them, but there are ways around that.
    • >>download locally an unlimitted amount of songs
      >>though, so maybe they just can't burn or
      >>transfer them, but there are ways around that.

      Correct, they can download an unlimited number of tracks but can't burn or transfer those tracks, these are identical to the songs that are paid for in terms of quality because they are the same files.

  • What's the deal with Napster? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kramer2718 ( 598033 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @04:18AM (#8186968) Homepage
    What kind of DRM do they employ?

    I ask for personally selfish reasons. I'm a graduate student at U of R (not Eastman). I don't live in the dorms, but I do have friends who do.

    I'm happy that I'll probably see benefit from this, but I'm not sure it's a good expenditure of University funds.

    On the other hand, it is a good idea for a community to pull together and bargain collectively with the music industry. That's really the only way to reach a reasonably fair deal.
    • I believe in real life Napster offers a combination of most songs you can download and play on one computer, plus a portable - however they also offer streamed songs, and probably for the school to reduce costs I am imagining they are going to provide streaming service only so the students can't burn CD's.
    • I'm going to graduate school at UR next semester. I had been using RIAA radar to make sure I wasn't giving the RIAA any money, but I guess that's pretty much pointless now, isn't it.

      Honestly, i'm pretty offended by having to pay for this. Same as having to pay for Windows and Office because my college had a site license. They don't give away free textbooks, and textbooks can cost as much or more than those, so let the people who want this crap pay for it.

      At least Windows/Office can be construed to have so
      • So far it's only a trial run. They were debating about what service to try, even had machines in the big lab in the library with iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody etc installed so students could test them out. Supopsedly, they were going to pick one and offer some sort of free trial to the students, then if it caught on, the students would have to pay. Since it's a subscription charge for the basic service, I assume it's going to be thrown in with the ResLife charges, which sucks for anyone who doesn't want to use
  • Skull & Bones members with insider connections to the RIAA have received copies of every commercial CD for Yale students at no charge.

    I smell a big fat commie-err-Yalie plot.
    • Well, it's not the first time for such to happen. Look at it, Orkut [orkut.com], a similar venture by another Ivy League college.
      Not something I'd want to associate myself with, given the prophecy of doom another one of these ventures [halliburton.com]
      shows with their photo of them "Leading the Way to Darwin". Fine, I'll be glad to welcome their demise...

  • What it means? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @04:27AM (#8187000) Homepage
    What it means? Well, I have two perspectives. First, there is the perspective that this shows how online music stores are growing rapidly in acceptance, when even universities are ready to sign up.

    The second perspective is that Napster 2 doesn't have anywhere near the negotiationing clout of Apple. I wonder how limited the song base is and whether or not the labels get control over what tracks are on Napster 2, because I'm SURE they weren't able to negotiate themselves out of that one. Is this simply labels gaining more control over what people listen to?

  • It would benefit the students if... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jonatanw ( 667696 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @04:39AM (#8187063) Homepage
    • Napster wasn't dead and noone uses it
    • It was free
    • You could download copyrighted material (as you can with all other p2p networks - would the students care about anything else than the latest R&B albums or the latest action movie?)
    Spreading your own works (music for instance) is a good thing to do over filesharing networks if someone downloads it.. However I assume that mp3.com (if it still existed) or similar would be a far better place as in the file sharing networks there is such a massive load of stuff available that you have to search specific things which i seldom beleive will be nothing but specific titles of copyrighted albums, movies, games etc.

    Anyone have experience with this? Is spreading your own unique creations really worth it over p2p networks? I would doubt that it is, but again, I wouldn't know..
    • I assume that mp3.com (if it still existed) or similar would be a far better place as in the file sharing networks there is such a massive load of stuff available that you have to search specific things which i seldom beleive will be nothing but specific titles of copyrighted albums, movies, games etc.

      One technique which I used to get alot of music was to search for for songs that I liked and browse the libraries of users that had it. As a result I downloaded alot of music I had never heard of and which

  • PSU Napster (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Soskywalkr ( 617860 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @04:47AM (#8187121)
    So yeah. I'm a PSU student. They've just installed firewalls everywhere on campus to block out everything, but internet, napster, im.

    No IM file transfers. No incoming ssh connections. No Network games. No Kazaa. etc.

    PSU signed a deal with napster because one of the board members is on the RIAA commision. There is also some administrative link to Napster.

    The big problem is that what they've put in place basically says "We don't trust you. At all."

    We've had bandwidth restrictions for two years (1.5G up/ 1.5G down)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Let's see, Penn State is a publicly funded University, UR I'm not sure but they probably take state tax dollars as well ... I wonder how the taxpayers of Pennsylvania and NY feel about subsidizing the RIAA, not to mention the cronyism angle.

        Are your parents or anyone you know alums? Write a nasty letter the next time they come asking for donations, explaining that you don't appreciate taxation w/o representation. Sometimes stepping on their air hose has a way of getting peoples attention.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • From : Students will receive this service for free as part of their overall information technology-related services that are partially funded by the University's Information Technology fee. There will be no increase in the fee as a result of this service.
  • Since we all connect to the net through our ISPs what if music producers cooperated with Internet Access Providers to make music available inexpensively? What if free music download (a la Napster) was bundled into internet access fees? Such scale would allow the fees per user to be reduced even further. Cheap(er) music download is a worthy goal since nothing is really free.
    • Problem with that, is that, I don't download music. I don't. I hardly listen to music, and when I do, provided I consider the album to be worthy of the heavily overinflated price the media companies want, so as to keep them in new Lear Jets yearly, then I buy it. I buy DVDs, if I consider what the DVD has to be worthy of the price.

      I don't download illegal music (not anymore; and not for legal reasons. Most music out there is pretty crappy now). Since I don't download music, I sure as hell don't think I s
      • A lot of business is based on the the understanding that not all users will make use of all the services provided all the time. But if its freely available you would find yourself downloading music too, once in a while. Most important thing is that the average cost is reduced because of the scale.
  • This is a stupid idea. The university is going to pay for music to be streamed from Napster, but students won't be able to download, burn, or transfer this music. They're still going to rip it off.

    Moreover, giving students access to high quality streams of full songs is really really dumb. Come on, have we already forgotten our older bootlegging methods? If it makes noise, it can be recorded. One can either run a line out to a tape deck or find something like Audio Hijack to record system audio to the ha

  • ECN problems (Score:3, Informative)

    by evanbd ( 210358 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @05:39AM (#8187410)
    That's annoying. Apparently you can't access their web site with ECN turned on. In case it's causing problems for anyone else who turned on ECN in their kernel config, you can turn it off with 'echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_ecn'. And yes, that does mean they are violating RFC 793 [faqs.org]. Anyway, if you're getting a connection refused error, and are using ECN, that's probably why. You can, as always, send complaints to webmaster@rochester.edu.
  • After reading the news release for this part of the discussion [rochester.edu]:

    If this didnt get a bit closer to advocating a police state under the rules of the RIAA as far as they care, then this
    is at least in my opinion quite fitting for the definition of a police state. You have the encouragment of turning people in,
    the monitoring of clear and non traffic for more than just the average security/quality/maintenance problems most universities
    have/had, and you're also a private university. The only shining points are w

  • tuition (Score:2, Informative)

    by Phyz ( 543291 )
    for those curious as to how bloodthirsty UR really is, tuition this year was on the order of ~24,000 ,which is higher than Harvard (Harvard students pay higher room and board). I live off campus, but getting that "we have to raise tuition by x% this year to better serve you" letter just pisses me off. How about they use some of their $1x10^9 endowment and drop tuition next year? How's that for a novel idea?
    • They wont my friend. A business is a business. And modern universities are just a business whose main goal is to make money, keep the status quo around, and make sure the top employees get a fat retirement check. Please forgive me professors, who actually are there to teach AND learn.
  • "and there is to be a live audio stream of the event."

    And the MP3 will be on Kazaa about 20 minutes after the event.

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