News
Last Friday: the day free music died
The Pointer
jglod170@uwsp.edu
Free music downloading came to its premature culmination on Friday, Feb. 7. Thousands of students across the United States suddenly found themselves without their connection to the music world that had been provided for free from Ruckus, an ad-supported online music streaming service that was aimed directly toward college students.
University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point was one of numerous campuses that promoted and supported Ruckus. Over 2500 students at UW-SP were signed up to receive this free service through Ruckus.
“We had contracted with Ruckus.com to provide cached music on our campus network for our resident students to take advantage of and our contract ended without notice at the time the Ruckus Web site went down last week,” said Colleen Andrews of Information Technology.
Ruckus was acquired by TotalMusic, the joint venture between Sony and UMG, with the intention of starting their own music service through it last year.
“I only hope that someone else figures out how to crack this music-on-the-Web nut in a way that is a win for everyone in the value chain,” said Jason Herskowitz, TotalMusic’s vice president of product management on his blog after the unplugging of Ruckus.com. “The problem is that to make a music service a win for everyone, then all of the famished participants, have to sit at the table and be content to let all the others have a little bit to eat, even though they are still hungry themselves.”
Ruckus faced certain flaws but was still well-used across the university community. Students using Macs could not use Ruckus as well as students with iPod technology.
Alternatives to the free music service provided by Ruckus are basically none.
“ResNet is researching other options, but there is no other service currently available like Ruckus,” said Andrews. “The one service that was somewhat like Ruckus - CDigix - pulled their music service for colleges in the spring of 2007 as well.”
Even though the Recording Industry Association of America has said they are curtailing lawsuits against college students, they continue to send Digital Millennium Copyright Act Violation Notices to campuses that still included carry the threat of lawsuits.
“UW-SP received eleven DMCA notices during the fall 2008 semester and has received seven this semester already,” said Andrews. “Most students and employees have been caught for illegally sharing music or video files from LimeWire or bitTorrent or Aresware peer-to-peer file sharing software.”
Andrews provides advice to students on how to avoid facing legal troubles as well as advice for those who do receive notices.
“Students and employees would be wise to avoid using these particular applications or risk getting caught for illegal file sharing,” said Andrews. “Illegal file sharing violates U.S. copyright laws as well as the campus network use.”
