| Legal downloading
gains popularity
By Sue DePassio
Collegian Reporter
Approximately 17,000 on-campus residents at
Penn State University have authorized access to nearly half
a million songs, thanks to a contract between the university
and Napster.
A first in higher education, this service
is a legal alternative to downloading. The PSU administration
anticipates this will curtail the use of illegal music sharing
and piracy.
Sam Haldeman, of PSU's Information Technology
Services, said on-campus residents registered for and installed
Napster's 2.0 services, which was included in students' tuition,
by visiting the Penn State Napster Web site.
The prospect of the Napster 2.0 service coming
to Hillsdale is slim.
"Downloading of music can hinder the
academic environment if it consumes more bandwidth than it should,"
said Patrick Chartrand, network/systems manager for Hillsdale
College's Information Technology Services.
At PSU students are able to download and share
songs through the Napster library and listen to online radio
stations. For 99 cents each, students can burn songs onto compact
discs or pay $9.95 for an entire album.
Colleges and universities offer students a
local area network connection to the Internet so users can be
connected at all times, providing faster downloading capabilities
than dial-up.
PSU instituted Napster this past fall for
students living in dormitories, but those who are off-campus
won't receive the service until the fall of 2004.
Hillsdale does not have an official policy
against downloading music. However, ITS restricts the amount
of bandwidth certain applications can use. With a limited amount
of bandwidth, music downloads transfer slower.
Chartrand said if many people are using a
downloading service the Packet Shaper (network software that
regulates traffic across an Internet connection) cannot detect,
then the service could consume all the available bandwidth for
downloading music.
This could prevent a number of things, from
a person doing research on the World Wide Web to a professor
getting important e-mails or potential students accessing the
college Web site.
Chartrand said certain music downloading applications
could consume all the bandwidth to the Internet, making applications
such as Web browsers, instant messenging, and e-mail non-functional.
Though people have been downloading music
since Napster was introduced, the prospect of Hillsdale incorporating
a downloading service into its tab is unlikely.
"I don't download music anymore because
my computer got a virus from sharing files," sophomore
Karen Crissman said. "It isn't worth paying for [the service]
either."
Mike Babel, the president of Napster, launched
Napster 2.0 to offer a large variety of songs to the public.
Babel said Napster currently has contracts
with five major record labels as well as 100 independent labels,
and has a catalog of 500,000 songs and grows by 1,000 songs
a week.
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