“In an attempt to curb illegal music downloading over the residential network, Brown University is offering the Napster 2.0 music service to students for free this year in a trial program. Napster is ‘the best we could offer at this point’ in terms of ‘a legitimate alternative to illegal file sharing,’ said David Greene, vice president for Campus Life and Student Services,” Ben Leubsdorf reports for The Brown Daily Herald.

Leubsdorf reports, “The Herald reported in February that a committee drawn from Computing and Information Services, Campus Life and Student Services and UCS met with representatives from four music services: Rhapsody, Cdigix, Ruckus and Napster. ‘There was strong consensus’ among the group of staff and students ‘that Napster was the best service at this time,’ Greene said. ‘Napster had the most to offer Brown,’ said Brian Bidadi ’06, UCS president. But, he said, ‘depending on the feedback we get from students, we can go in a different direction.’ Saxton-Frump agreed, ‘Napster seemed to make sense for a pilot program,’ noting its ease of use and large music library of 1.5 million songs.”

“However, the service is not compatible with either the Macintosh operating system or with Apple’s popular iPod music player, which has cornered more than 83 percent of the digital music player market, according to industry estimates,” Leubsdorf reports. “None of the four services examined were compatible with Macintosh or Linux, according to Saxton-Frump, so Napster did not stand out in that regard. ‘We did try to get a discount from Apple so that we could offer an alternative service for iPods, but the discount offered was not a great incentive,’ Ellen Waite-Franzen, vice president for CIS, wrote in an e-mail to The Herald… In the meantime, he said, Macintosh users can run Napster using the VirtualPC program. Saxton-Frump suggested that Macintosh users run their accounts on University computers in clusters around campus.”

Full article here.
Congratulations, Brown, on the purchase of your new Edsel.

Information for schools interested in including all of their students, including large communities of Mac users and iPod users should investigate Apple’s “iTunes on Campus” program, which includes volume licensing and features for BOTH Mac and Windows users.

Related articles:
The Mac is the ‘Nigger’ of the Computer Industry – Rodney O. Lain
Napster is a joke – April 05, 2005
Napster’s dirty little secret: changing subscription services into downloads is easy – February 19, 2005
Napster-To-Go’s ‘rental music’ DRM circumvented – February 14, 2005Why ‘Napster To Go’ will flop – February 03, 2005
Cornell University’s Mac users ‘uniformly unhappy’ with Napster – January 19, 2005
Cornell University wrestles with Napster’s exclusion of Mac and iPod-using students – September 08, 2004
Why are Cornell’s Mac students being forced to pay for useless Napster? – September 07, 2004Napster schools to Mac-using students: bend over and take it – September 04, 2004
Apple launches ‘iTunes on Campus’ institutional site license program – April 28, 2004