College Students Ignore Napster (I love my school!)

I think that's more what Napster is looking for.

"Back when I was a kid, music used to be a big deal. People actually paid to play music in these wide open spaces and thousands of people would pay to hear them play, even if they could just barely see them and the sound wasn't very good. Then, they'd pay $45 for a t-shirt that let everyone know they'd seen the band! People actually collected music on discs, that's really how the whole thing got started, y'see.... blah, blah, blah, I'm old, etc."

Ms. Vance:

I'm currently a student at the University of Rochester, and since I've
been a longtime fan of The Register, I figured I'd send an email
detailing what I've seen on the other side of this issue.

I'll start with my personal experience:

I'm a nerd, I live and breathe computers. Trying new software is
something I do all the time, and consequently I'd installed napster
within a few days of UR opening the service. I then tried to use it -
I streamed songs, tried a tethered download etc. It was all well and
good, except... every couple seconds during playback, it would skip.
It drove me nuts. I sent Napster tech support an email, and their
response was, "Reinstall Napster," something I had done before
contacting tech support. I wasn't that thrilled with the concept of
not being able to listen to music without a network connection,
either, as campus Wifi is spotty in most areas.

So, I uninstalled it. I haven't used it since, either.

From my conversations with friends, lots of other people had trouble
with the software. Not just skipping, either. Additionally, Mac users
are SOL, because there's no client. What are Mac users supposed to do?
This could lead to some thorny issues if we're forced into paying for
it.

Of the people that got it to work, it seems most used it for a few
weeks, then stopped, for some reason or another. I never attempted to
find out why, I just stopped seeing it on people's screens and assumed
they'd had tech problems, as well.

That's the concrete part of this email.

In addition, there's a rumor going around, which I have no way to
confirm. It comes to you by way of a conversation I had with a
professor a few months ago.

The rumor has it that the Napster deal arose due to a relationship
between someone high-up in the administration - former president
Jackson, I believe - and a certain former RIAA president. The gist of
it seems to be, Jackson asked, "How can we avoid being sued for peer
to peer?" and Napster was the response (if there was more, it hasn't
come by my ears). So, Napster was implemented. It gives the school
plausible deniability on filesharing offenses, and brownie points from
the RIAA.

So one would expect that RIAA scuffles are minimal at UR, right?

Nope - A number of students, including myself, received very
threatening letters from UR admin, on behalf of the RIAA. The letter
said, in essence, "You have n hours to remove the offending material
from our network, UR will NOT help you out in any way, if you don't."

Well, isn't that lovely... not at all like the magnanimous response of
the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute a few hundred miles away, which,
when it found out students were being sued by the RIAA, offered free
legal advice.

At the time I received the letter, I'd been at home on summer vacation
for a few weeks, and found it somewhat curious that I had been told I
had a deadline to remove material when I was far, far away from the
network in question.

Something else worries me further, however. This is _really_
speculative: I think the University of Rochester aided the RIAA in
monitoring the campus network. I am not a huge filesharing user. I
primarily used the UR Direct Connect hub for music, and occasionally
Bit Torrent to download TV shows. During that semester I also used
i2hub for a few hours, to find individual mp3s.

The kicker is that the Direct Connect hub is totally inaccessible from
outside UR (this was ordered by the administration). The network ports
are blocked; you can't even connect externally.

So how did the RIAA nab me? Bit Torrent and i2hub? Bit Torrent we can
drop, because I didn't really use it for anything the RIAA would be
concerned with (I'm still waiting for a letter from the MPAA). i2hub
is my best bet, and here is where the suspicion comes in: I probably
used i2hub for a total of five hours in an entire semester. So, unless
the RIAA got me in those five hours - which were spread out over a
semester - it had to be through Direct Connect, which, as stated
above, is not accessible by the general public. Get the tin foil hats.

I haven't mentioned all of it to my parents - they don't need another
reason to complain about a $40000 a year education.

Due to my being flagged by the RIAA, I request you keep this email
anonymous if you use it anywhere.

I hope you found my thoughts interesting and useful. Please feel free
to follow up with any questions.

-G