Tuesday, September 06, 2005

In an attempt to curb illegal music downloading over the residential network, the University is offering the Napster 2.0 music service to students for free this year in a trial program.

The pilot program offers the Napster music service to students for the academic year, with subscriptions expiring on May 31, 2006. Students can download songs onto their computers for free using Napster, and for a fee put them on a digital music player or compact disc, a service called Napster To Go. Downloaded songs cannot be played after the subscription expires, though students will have the option of purchasing the service themselves.

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.

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.

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.

Greene blamed the problem on the continuing battle between Apple and its competitors for the digital music market.

"Until this gets settled at the industry level, there's nothing we can do about it," he said.