AfterDawn: Tech news

Legal Napster service launched for Penn State

Written by Petteri Pyyny @ 14 Jan 2004 3:05 User comments (7)

Legal Napster service launched for Penn State The former P2P network, now a legal music service owned by Roxio, the Napster service is now available for Penn State university students for free.
The aim is to curb ever-growing illegal music sharing within university's network and also to curb the increasing external bandwidth requirements the school has to cope with as its students use broadband connections from their dorms to download music from P2P networks such Kazaa.

And apparently, the service has been quite a success. School reported that three days after its launch, service had generated over 100,000 downloads or streaming requests from the students and already 2,600 of school's 17,000 eligible students had registered with the service. School plans to make all of its 83,000 students eligible to the service by this fall.

Of course there's a catch in form of DRM. The deal between Penn State and Napster doesn't allow students to burn the music on CDRs, but need to pay a fee to do so.

Source: CNN

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7 user comments

114.1.2004 17:28

Maybe some student at Penn State will be kind enough to crack the DRM for his fellow students.

215.1.2004 04:41

Lets hope not! Or at least lets hope he doesn't release it, this seems to be a good thing for the college students now listen for free and pay if they want to burn it to CD-R. Of course it all depends on what they (Napster/Roxio)charges to allow them to burn it.

315.1.2004 06:26
Rodgers
Inactive

From where I sit Roxio is practicing discrimination only allowing Penn State students freebies. Let's start playing the game on the same level and cut-out the the favoritism. Best to all! Rodgers

415.1.2004 11:47

Just give it time, if it turns out to be a big success at PSU, then it more than likely will be spread to other colleges and universities. Just as long as nobody posts a net wide crack of the thing. Then it will NEVER spread around to others. I would be perfectly happy just being able to listen to the music on my computer at home. Even though it would take awhile to download anything on a 56k.

524.1.2004 09:48

Dude, it's not like they're giving us freebies...we pay a $160 technology fee every year, and rather than updating stuff around campus, they're using the money to pay for napster...and once you're out of school, your access goes away, so you have to either pay the 99 cents per song to download it, or lose all the music.

625.1.2004 09:52
Rodgers
Inactive

Your technology fee of $160 has nothing to do with your getting free Napster, unless of course they are giving a course in Napster at your college. That would not be surprising these days. Best to all! Rodgers

727.1.2004 09:38

How can it be free if we're paying for it? The fee is mandatory...you have to pay it, and so whatever they use it for, we pay for. Napster isn't giving the service to us for free, they're getting paid.

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