Within three days after the launch of the Napster service for Penn State students, over 2,600 students have registered for the service and have generated around 100,000 downloads and streaming audio requests during that period. This service is designed to move students away from illegally sharing and downloading music over peer-to-peer networks to a more legal approach.
All of Penn state's on-campus resident students can avail of the service as the cost of the Napster service is already covered by their tuition costs. Penn State aims to offer this service to all of its 83,000 students in autumn and staff will qualify for reduced-price Napster memberships. While members have unlimited access to around 500,000 tracks on the Napster service, a fee per track must still be paid to record any tracks to CD. GristyMcFisty submitted the following news from Yahoo via our news submit :
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As spring semester classes got under way Monday at Penn State, more than 2,600 students had registered for the Napster 2.0 service, which comes free with their tuition. All 17,000 on-campus resident students are eligible to use it. School officials said the new system, which offers about 500,000 songs to choose from, appeared to work flawlessly for the vast majority of users. By Monday, more than 8,000 visits were logged on the Napster Web site devoted for use by Penn State students. For a fee, students also can burn music onto compact discs. The school plans to offer the service to all of its 83,000 students this fall. Faculty, staff and alumni will qualify for reduced-price Napster memberships. |
With that many tracks accessed over such a small period, it looks like the students are making good use of the service as well as the service appearing to become a major success. While students must pay to record any tracks, at least they have the ability to freely listen away to music and find out which songs they really like and wish to record.
On the other hand, it is a pity that they do not have the ability to freely take them outside of the University by any means unless they first pay and record them to CD. This is fine for students that only listen to music while in the computer labs, but most students actually download music to listen to later at home. I am sure that some students will try other means of taking their music with them such as piping the headphones-out of the PC to the line-in of a portable MiniDisc or MP3 recorder.
Feel free to discuss and read more about Napster, peer-to-peer applications and other legal services on our Music Downloads, P2P & Legal Issues Forum.
Source: Yahoo Technology News
