“The company behind the Napster 2.0 online music service said Monday it has signed agreements with several universities to offer students its digital song subscription program,” Alex Veiga reports for The Associated Press. “Beginning in the fall, students at Cornell University, The George Washington University, Middlebury College, the University of Miami, The University of Southern California and Wright State University will have access to the service through the schools, the company said.”
“The Napster deals are one of many steps colleges nationwide are taking to discourage illegal music file-sharing among students,” Veiga reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Do the schools realize that their students all have iPods and iPod minis, organize their digital music collections via Apple’s iTunes, and they’ll have to burn CDs from Napster’s WMA files before they can import them into iTunes for transfer to their iPods? What a mess! Since Napster songs and albums cost the same as iTunes, students are just going to use Napster as a radio, if they use it at all, providing the school doesn’t charge them too much. And they’ll buy songs for their iPods directly from iTunes anyway. The three students at each school who got Dell Digital Junkboxes for Christmas from their crazy Aunt Louise will undoubtedly be thrilled. The rest will probably transfer to Duke.
Related MacDailyNews article:
Duke University to give Apple iPods to all incoming freshman – July 19, 2004
Schools are run by the most out-of-touch things on the planet.
Crazy Aunt Louise – LOL!
The Register has a good take on this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/19/riaa_napster_six/
Student 1: “Do you go to a Napster school or an iTunes school?”
Student 2: “A Napster school.”
Student 1: “That’s too bad. Sorry.”
Student 2: “Yeah, I know, it sucks – we all just use iTunes anyway.”
Student 1: “Cool.”
Student then talk about how they both love their iPods.
Napster should sell iPods like HMV in England. Its the only way that they ever could make any money.
So what about all the students who use Macs, which napster is not compatible with. They just get to pay for a service they can’t use? (or probably wouldn’t even if they could)
Can iTunes even convert WMA files that have DRM?
MacJack,
No, iTunes converts unprotected WMA to AAC. If it could convert DRM-laden WMA, it would illegal, of course.
Students would have to burn CDs of songs they want for their iPods and then use that CD to import them into iTunes. The DRM would be dropped during the CD burning process. But, the files will have been degraded somewhat by transcoding from WMA (sucks to begin with) to CD to AAC or whatever encoder iTunes is set up to use for import.
The Napster deals are one of many steps colleges nationwide are taking to discourage illegal music file-sharing among students
Why should a university care at all? What next: toothbrushes? Oh, they don’t want their students sued by the RIAA and so will pay the $3 per head extortion fee? Hmm… seems that the college heads need to go back to college. Oh, that won’t work… it’s a circular argument.
it just goes to show how out of touch some school administrations are. But its not like its impossible to prevent students from connecting to P2P services. Whats wierd is that they sometimes only block certain services. One of my buddies can use Kazaa but not Limewire. Kazaa sure was a pain in the ass when you wanted to remove everything that was bundled with it. So glad Im not on a PC anymore.
Soon Micro$oft followers are going to enjoy (yeah right!) subscription based downloads. They claim a user of subscription based players is going to fill their drive with all the songs they want for a small monthly fee. But what happens when they stop paying their fees? All their files are just going to fill their crappy players, because they will be useless. Their digital rights management crap is going to lock them until they pay.
University bookworms should get out to the real world every now and then, and enjoy the sun. That way they would know and see that the best player out there is the iPod. Then maybe they could recommend the best product for their students.
Holy hell, that was hilarious!
It is nice of Napster to provide everyone with a list of Universities that do not have a clue about the real world.
Seriously, would you spend your money going to, or sending your kids to, one of these institutions that is so out of touch with reality?
The real IT world. I love that saying, it’s so meaningless.
A conversation I overheard in the dorm:
Dude, that is so cool !
Napster Rocks I luv to download music for free !
Hmm, What, I like have to pay for Napster ?
Oh, Never mind.
Back to Kazaa….
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Subscriptions won’t work in the long run because people will simply “wiretap” all the music they want and then unsubscribe after a month or two.
Why should universities care? Because if Orin Hatch’s digital copyright protection bill gets passed, the University themselves could became targets since they operate the networks facilitating file sharing.
This should not be something universities should have to deal with.
these aren’t downloads…
you can’t buy music with these.. you have to ‘backup’ your ‘collection’ with stolen music..sooo really it’s back to p2p
these deals are for unlimited subscribed music with napster..
did the school’s have to pay for the software?
if they do why wouldn’t they just have itunes?
Tony said:
“Subscriptions won’t work in the long run because people will simply “wiretap” all the music they want and then unsubscribe after a month or two.”
Windoze users on the whole aren’t as bright as Mac users, but Tony is right. They’ll finally figure out that they can “wiretap” or “audio hijack” hundreds of thousands of tunes, then unsubscribe to the service.
What or who is going to stop them?
Students would have to burn CDs of songs they want for their iPods and then use that CD to import them into iTunes.
Windoze users on the whole aren’t as bright as Mac users, but Tony is right. They’ll finally figure out that they can “wiretap” or “audio hijack” hundreds of thousands of tunes, then unsubscribe to the service.
For real. I don’t know who came up with this burning CDs stuff to get around DRM. There are similar programs to Audio Hijack and Wiretap for WinDOS.
At Penn State this service has been available since last year. It was run as a pilot for a semester and is now available to the entire student body. I know for a fact that Apple was also part of the negotiations … they just couldn’t make it work for PSU. Also, PSU felt that the streaming options were better for what they were trying to do. I teach and talk to my class about this type of this stuff all the time (and actually pull the project leads for the Napster initiative into class for guest lectures) … what a lot of students say is that they use the streaming, but a good many of them do use iTunes to actually buy tracks. As far as a Mac client … not soon. Again, on good info, “it is in the works,” but not now. Right now all of us Mac people are out of luck — if you consider listening to tethered, streaming files that are of terrible quality lucky.
I am really bummed by the whole thing, but you can’t imagine the number of white ear buds are on our campus. I know where they are NOT getting their music from!
Oh God, why must my school be so stupid? After going in the right direction with a lot of programs and getting huge technology grant, USC goes out and does something like this. Now worries though, I’ve got a feeling that the student body, which is comprised of about 80% iPod users, will have a say in this.
It makes much more sense to distribute iTunes to the students. They all have iPods anyway, and there is very little use to have streaming audio to just your notebook. The students need something that they can download to their iPod.
In addition, iTunes is for BOTH PC and Macs. Do these colleges realize that they are isolating their Mac users?
With iTunes distribution [ http://www.apple.com/education/itunesoncampus ], the college is not under any risk of violating any RIAA licenses, or other such legal red tape in the future.
Do you really want to go to a college without Macs and iPods? EWWWW!!!!
huh? Napster is free too guys.. don’t you get that the only reason this is happening is cuz the universities hate the bandwidth hogging of Kazaa..
The universities get a kickback (better than free itunes, obviously) and the students get.. unlimited…er.. usage.. er..listening experience.. of music.. sort of..
the only losers.. well, apple of course, and the customers who will not be able to use the most coveted music player..
the stage is REALLy crucial for these companies, because people are starting to rip their vast CD collections and, well.. for them to get an iPod, they might be too lazy to re-rip everything…
I’m going on the basis that, most people use IE.. that is fucking scary..
Is it not too much of a stretch to imagine that most people will go for these butt ugly WMA stores..
Hehe.. unless they have an HP..
Or a Mac of course..
PS>It’s worth noting that almost NONE of these WMA stores work for Mac users… the same mac users that downloaded a WHOPPING 1.5M songs a week before the Windows Version came out…
That’s incredible.. and they expect to compete with Apple..
From the Inquirer Napster Report
~~~~~
It’s lucky for Napster that the RIAA picked it as a henchman. Students can now download as many songs as they like while enrolled at a university. This is a nice service if holding onto to your tunes is not important. Once their four years at school are over, the students are cut off from Napster and lose all the music they’ve download. That is unless they pay 99 cents per song or $10 per album to own a permanent download that can be burned onto CDs or MP3 players.
~~~~~~~
LMAO That is hilarious.. soooo back to copying Apple is it?
All in a day’s work.. hahahahaha