Penn State offering students free use of Napster

Pennsylvania State University is trying to discourage students from illegally downloading… Pennsylvania State University is trying to discourage students from illegally downloading music files – by providing a legal way to do it.

This spring, the University will provide the newly revamped Napster service to all students living on campus by using money from the students’ $160 information technology fee.

“I don’t think it’s fair that every student has to pay for it when I know that not everyone is going to, or even be able to use it,” Penn State senior April Vassilos said.

Vassilos and other students are concerned because the service is only available to the student body living on campus and since the new version of Napster will not work on computers with a Windows Millennium Edition or Macintosh operating system.

Students will be able to listen to a limitless amount of songs; however, if they want to keep the song on their computer’s hard drive, they will have to pay a 99-cent fee per song.

“I think that Napster is a good idea because it keeps students from running into very costly lawsuits,” said Sonya Scholz, a Penn State sophomore. “My friend from a different school was sued for $70,000 because she downloaded the wrong song off of Kazaa.”

While students at Penn State will have Napster in the spring, Pitt currently has no intentions to follow in their footsteps.

“Before we would do anything like that, we would consult the students to see if they were interested,” said Jinx Walton, a senior administrator in computing services at Pitt.

To curtail students’ usage of popular file-sharing programs, such as Kazaa or iMesh, Pitt has advertised the fact that file sharing is illegal.

According to Walton, the number of “tickets,” or violation notices, given to file-sharing students has decreased this term.

“This year, there were fewer than there were last year, and we do have posters in the residence halls and pamphlets available everywhere,” Walton said.

Walton explained that the recording, movie or software industry contacts the University when a computer on the network is in violation. Pitt then tracks the machine committing the violation and issues a ticket.

The University sends an e-mail and a letter to the student, instructing them to remove the copyrighted material from their computer within five days, then to contact the Technology Help Desk. Students who fail to contact the Technology Help Desk in the allotted time period have their network port – Internet connection – suspended. Repeat offenses can result in legal action against the student.

Walton said Pitt had no problem with legal file sharing.