p2pnet - rss feed: Tennessee says No to Napster
p2pnet.net News:- Neither Napster II’s owner, Roxio, nor the music industry have been able to convince the Tennessee Board of Regents to allow the now somewhat bedraggled cat into their system.
Roxio was delighted when, with a little help from its friends in the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), Penn State agreed to force-feed students with ‘free’ musical pap from the RIAA’s owners, the Big Five record labels, using the sad remains of Napster to do so.
Unfortunately (for Napster II) this didn’t lead to scores of requests from other universities from across the country to follow suit.
In fact, only one other institution has so far gone for the deal, and that’s the University of Rochester, which, as another ‘pilot’ project, gets Napster II cheap.
Coincidentally, senior administrators from both schools are active on the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities, the Hollywood group that helps market entertainment industry ‘product’ direct to students to protect them from prosecution - by the entertainment industry.
Anyway, in a story headlined Regents not interested in buying Napster systemwide, USA TODAY says, “Napster, the company that popularized illegal music downloads in dorm rooms across the country, is now trying to sell music legally to colleges and universities.”
Well actually, that’s not strictly accurate.
Shawn Fanning’s original Napster “popularized illegal music downloads in dorm rooms”. The current Napster II has nothing to do with Fanning or Napster-as-was, and the company now trying to “sell music legally to colleges and universities” is Roxio, also nothing to do with the original Napster.
But no matter because, “it doesn’t look like the Tennessee Board of Regents, and its 180,000 students at 45 schools, will be part of it,” the story says, going on:
“One proposal called for students to pay an extra mandatory fee that would have allowed them to get music from Napster without having to worry about being hounded by an army of music industry lawyers.”
However, “the mandatory fee that was part of the Tennessee plan, coupled with the perception that illegal downloading doesn’t pose a specific problem for the schools, prompted system officials to table the idea, said Bob Adams, the Regents’ vice chancellor for business and finance,” USA TODAY states, quoting Adams as saying the decision was made this week at a staff meeting and, “So it’s nothing we’re pursuing right now. It’s nothing we’re going to be working on in the foreseeable future here.”
