Students at Penn State University will soon be able to legally download music for free. The university announced Thursday an agreement with Napster allowing students to download music from the online service.
The agreement was designed to target the problem of illegal downloading and file sharing.
\Illegal peer-to-peer file sharing and music piracy has been a problem that has found a breeding ground at colleges and universities because of our high-speed computer networks,"" said Tysen Kendig, spokesperson for Penn State University.
While the agreement allows students to download music at no additional charge, there will be a fee of 99 cents for burning a song onto a compact disc or portable device such as an mp3 player.
The program will be launched as a pilot program in the upcoming spring semester. According to Kendig, it will be first be available to 18,000 students in university housing. The service will become available to all students, on and off campus, in fall 2004.
The cost of this service will be paid out of the Information Technology Fee that Penn State students already pay annually. According to Spanier, the fee will not increase with the implementation of the program.
""We're really providing this at no additional cost to students,"" Kendig said.
There are currently no plans to implement such a service at UW-Madison, according to Brian Rust, spokesperson for Division of Information Technology. However, if UW-Madison were to implement such a program, it would be more limited than Penn State's. Instead of being available to all students, it would only be available to those in university housing. This means that it would be the Housing Division's decision whether or not to have such a service.
""It's really something that UW Housing has to decide because they would have to figure out a way to cover the fee. It would probably come from what students pay for for their dorm rooms,"" Rust said.
According to Rust, a service like Penn State's was discussed, but the decision was made not to go forward with it. Instead, UW-Madison has tried to shape traffic and inform students that the university's network is not to be used for file sharing.
""The university does not want to be in the business of proactively enabling students to access music files,"" Rust said.
Rust also expressed concern about the success of Penn State's program, particularly its fee for burning CDs and transferring music to portable devices.
""What's to keep the students from continuing to file share?"" Rust asked.
However, several students expressed enthusiasm over the idea of having a service like Penn State's at UW-Madison.
""I wouldn't want to pay more for it, but overall it's a good way to make music available to students,"" said Julia Dauenhauer, UW-Madison sophomore and University Housing resident.
