Cornell University student Ross Blankenship ’05 has written a letter to the editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. The Cornell Daily Sun has published the letter in today’s edition:
There are many problems with the deal that was made between our Student Assembly, Cornell University and Napster Inc. The first is that our Assembly members agreed to something without informing its student body of such a big decision. The decision now gives Cornell students zero options to Napster’s largely incompatible and obsolete service. While 23 Student Assembly members were enjoying Napster for “free” last year during this company’s lobbying campaign, many students either paid for music or did not have the same access to Napster.
Who is to say that Napster offered the “best deal” if 13,500 undergraduates had no say on this or many other online services? Should we not have held a student vote on the issue? With a campus that prides itself in “Rock[ing] the Vote” and keeping students involved, why wasn’t there further research done outside of the oh-so-representative sample of the Student Assembly?
Furthermore, if nearly “20 percent of students could not run the current Napster technology” today with their Macintosh systems, iPods and older Windows operating systems, then why should these students be forced into paying for this service? Besides the resounding technical difficulties that Napster brings, why shouldn’t the student body be able to choose whether they use Napster or some other service, instead of automatically being charged for Napster?
This is another example of Cornell’s fleecing its students and usurping our individual choice. Napster has won and individual student choice is lost. The bottom line is that there are options for students and Napster shouldn’t be the only one.
Related MacDailyNews article:
Napster schools to Mac-using students: bend over and take it – September 04, 2004
