p2pnet - rss feed: Penn State’s solution to file sharing
p2pnet.net News:- Penn State bans servers, provides info on Napster Program
That’s Jason Schultz’s in-a-nutshell LawGeek summary of the current situation at Penn State University, the first major US teaching institution to embrace the Big Five record labels’ ‘Buy our music through Napster II and we won’t sue you under our DMCA ‘ marketing plan.
Interestingly, Schultz says Penn still receives about the same number of DMCA ‘infringement’ notices as it did before Napster II’s arrival, according to Russell S. Vaught, Penn’s associate vp, Information Technology.
The Big Five record labels’ RIAA and Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities walked Napster II in, opening the way for other music industry supplied and backed services such as Sony’s and Apple’s, with Microsoft looming in the background, soon to follow.
The university of Rochester was the next to sign up, Organized Music is currently working on Ohio and students at both campuses are regularly ‘reminded’ by staff that Napster II is the way to go.
Back to Penn, on his LawGeek blog here, Schultz says:
“I’m at the EDUCAUSE Policy Conference this week in D.C to talk about EFF’s VCL. I’m currently in a session on DMCA Enforcement where Russell S. Vaught, Associate Vice Provost, Information Technology, The Pennsylvania State University (the chief architect of Penn State’s Neo-Napster program) is speaking,” Schultz writes, going on that Vaught had many interesting things to say:
“(1) Penn State now has an absolute ban on any student running a server in a residential dorm. Period. The only possible exception is if you swear to only use it for ‘educational’ purposes and get written permission [Schultz’s empahasis] from a faculty member and get approval from the Vice Provost.
“So this is part of Penn State’s solution to copyright infringement: Take away computing tools from students. As Ed Felten pointed out in our later panel discussion, this is a very dangerous approach for educational institutions to take. Computer science students often learn best through hands-on experimentation and tinkering with technology, and as Jamie Boyle noted in his plenary talk, unplanned experimentation often bears the biggest educational fruit. To paraphrase: ‘How many times do we learn more from the book next to the book we originally went to find on the shelf, or from the article after the article we looked up in the journal?’ Hence, restricting access to content and technology out of fear for infringment can have a very real and direct impact on the ability of students to learn. [Note: Both Yahoo! and Google began as ‘unauthorized’ Stanford student experiments with servers - should those had been banned as well?]
“Felten also pointed out (again, paraphrase) that servers are perhaps the single most revolutionary advance in self-publishing technology since the printing press. Students running their own servers are publishing and expressing themselves like never before. To take away this means of digital speech does academic freedom quite a disservice.
“(2) Vaught also provided some numbers re: Penn State’s ‘Lionshare’ project that uses Neo-Napster to compete with P2P. “Here’s some of what he showed us:
- Contract signed since Nov. 5, 2003
- Spring semester - Residence Halls Only
- Summer -all students- Fall - all students at all locations; faculty and staff for a fee
- Centrally funded - no direct costs except to purchase tracks.
- Status
- 16,5000 residence students
- 75% have machines that can use the program (no Macs)
- 85% of those have signed up
- 100,000+ tracks per day in first few weeks
- Around 80,000 tracks per day toward end of semester.
Contract - has study provisions
- Frequency of use
- 40% use it few times a week
- 35% every day
- 20% few times a month
- 15% never
Are you able to find the content you want?
-only 40 percent say yes.
How would you rate the purchase prices to burn tracks?
- excellent 2.5%
- good 10% (songs)/15% (album)
- average 20-25%
- fair 20-25%
- poor - 37%
Main Complaints:
- valued and new tracks not available
- macs not supported
- off campus students can’t get it
Conclusions:
- Teaching kids the right behavior
- Piracy may have decreased*
” *On this last point, I asked Vaught what evidence he had that piracy had actually decreased. He admitted that he didn’t have much empirical evidence and that, in fact, the number of DMCA infringement notices that they receive now is essentially the same as before the program. He did note, though, that he had anecdotal evidence that students were file-sharing less and that the DMCA notices were more regarding dial-up than broadband these days.”
May 25th, 2004 at 2:56 pm
You pussied out Penn State. Instead of bucking the establishment and being real-world changers you caved in. You “choked” on the spoon-fed monopoly of the major record labels! If this is endemic of your academic stature you have indeed set the future of this country on a course to a society shackled by outdated rules of copyright law. The digital age screams for equity among ALL musicians…especially those without airplay who aren’t like the Brittany Spears wannabes. The majors, if they gain control, will seek to pricefix the digital market and stifle competition as they have done with the current system for years.
May 25th, 2004 at 5:19 pm
If you wanna play “journalist” on the internet, follow one of the first rules: get the names right.
“Penn” is University of Pennsylvania.
“Penn State” is the Pennsylvania State University.
Separate institutions.