Penn State launches pilot file-sharing project

While many college students are violating copyright laws by downloading music off the Internet, Pennsylvania State University administrators are providing their students with a legal alternative.

Penn State announced last week that it developed a deal with Napster, which would allow students to listen to downloaded music on a temporary basis, said Rodney Erickson, executive vice president and provost at Penn State.

Napster, now a for-profit business that pays royalties, has developed technology that prevents songs from being played after a set period of time or from being burned onto a CD. The technology ensures that students will have to pay 99 cents per song if they want to keep the music on their machines after they graduate from college, Erickson said.

"We've been working on the problem of illegal file sharing for at least [the] past two, two and a half years, and knowing that both the recording industry and the university itself was cracking down on illegal behavior, we wanted to provide a viable legal alternative," he said.

Two weeks ago, Penn State officials met with a small group of students piloting the program until January, according to Julie Vastyan, a senior involved in the preliminary pilot.

The beta test group has a total of seven students, said Vastyan, who is also the Penn State student government public relations director.

So far, the preliminary pilot has received student support, but has also shed light on some potential problems.

"I found 300 songs that I liked," Vastyan said, mentioning that she couldn't find two songs she had wanted.

"I love it," Penn State sophomore and student government representative Chris Owens added.

Although Napster does not offer many of his favorite independent bands, "if you want to get their music, you just go to the concert and buy the music for $5 after the show," he said.

But there are also technical limitations.

Of the seven students in the preliminary pilot, the two using Windows ME found that Napster would not work, Vastyan said. In addition, problems have been reported with Apple computers.

In January, 18,000 of Penn State's 83,038 students will be involved in a larger pilot program, Vastyan said.

At this point in time, Penn's administration is unclear how to address this situation.

"We are continually looking at and evaluating [ideas] to determine how best to meet the sometimes competing needs between copyright infringement and people's desire to have free access to music," said Robin Beck, vice president of information systems and computing at Penn.

"There are a lot of issues there, and I don't have answers to the questions yet," she said. Beck added that, in the interim, "we have a strong awareness program to make sure people really do understand what they're doing and their own personal liability."

"It has been Penn's history to not be first out of the box in response to technology shifts in particular," University President Judith Rodin said. That policy "has served us very well in the long term, both financially and legally."

However, Penn will "continue to monitor new developments," she added.

Most Penn students aren't yet aware of Penn State's initiative. Those who are, though, expressed ambivalence.

"I've heard a little about it," Wharton freshman Charles Kim said.

Although it sounds like a good idea on the surface, the fact that people download from a wide variety of sources may be problematic, he said.

"People are going to be using the other downloading warez anyway" which could make the contract useless, he added.

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