Start your downloads

It's official. Thanks to the Undergraduate Assembly, Penn students will now be able to download music legally from the Internet -- kind of. Our student government selected Ruckus Networks Inc. to provide this service, but the distribution system, while free to students and the University, is far from perfect.

Many students will likely give Ruckus a try, but students and administrators have to be kidding themselves to think that this will replace illegal downloading.

Don't pretend Ruckus is something it's not.

It will likely be a great tool for discovering new music and listening to old favorites. And it will be nice, too, for the few who own digital music players that aren't iPods -- if they want to pay $15 a semester for the right to use the music on their devices. The ability to download movies, though students must fork over $20 a semester, may also appeal to some students.

But what the system won't do is replace illegal downloading as the primary way students obtain music these days. College students -- many of who own the ubiquitous iPod -- want music they can listen to outside of their rooms and music they can burn on CDs for friends or themselves.

Furthermore, Penn students will be particularly annoyed when their Ruckus-downloaded music stops working one month into the summer -- again, unless students pay a fee. And they will be similarly upset about being forced to pay $60 a year after graduation, just to ensure that their downloaded music continues to work.

It's unfortunate that a service took this long to be adopted by Penn. The UA and the University decided that the best course of action was to wait and see, causing them to miss the opportunity to sign an agreement with RealNetworks Inc., whose Rhapsody music service is the only legal music downloading service for universities that works on computers running the Macintosh operating system.

The company has since stopped offering the service to new university subscribers.

And with Rhapsody no longer an option, all the other download services leave Mac users out in the cold; Mac OS does not support the copyright-protected format used by all legal services besides Rhapsody.

Despite these faults, it seems as though Ruckus is the best service currently available, mainly because the basic jukebox service is absolutely free to students and the University.

Without paying a dime, students with Windows computers will be able to download an unlimited number of songs to their computers, and the network's community feature will allow students to share playlists, allowing for simple exposure to new music.

Unfortunately, a program that meets every student's demands simply does not exist at the moment, and Ruckus, being free, is a great substitute -- as long as you don't own an Apple computer.

After sitting on this for years, the UA made the best decision it could, but when that perfect, or even improved, program does come around, let's get on board right away.

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