Posted: 2/7/07

What’s the Ruckus on campus?
Downloading music the legal way

Colin Vallance| photo editor
cvallance@smcvt.edu

In the past, acquiring music from online file-sharing programs has been embraced with apprehensive optimism by users. Free music versus a possible copyright infringement lawsuit is a tempting gamble that many are willing to take.

Danielle Speed, St Michael’s senior, took the downloading music on campus wager and lost. During Speed’s second semester of her sophomore year she was surprised to find that her network account was suspended.

“I was trying to log onto a computer in a lab and it wouldn’t let me on,” says Speed.

After the discovery she contacted information technology (IT) and they informed her that she had to go meet with the assistant director of the department. When she spoke with him he explained to her that the school’s lawyers were in contact with the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) lawyers and that music record labels were threatening to sue her for copyright infringement, says Speed.

“I was totally freaked out, I didn’t know what to do. The guy in IT told me that one of three things could happen. Nothing could happen, I could be sued by the record label, and even kicked out of school because I broke rules in the student handbook,” says Speed.

Downloading music no longer a gamble

Ruckus, the latest legal, digital entertainment service, has brought free music back to college campuses. The service boasts a library of more than 2.5 million songs that are available to anyone who has a college email address with an .edu domain.

Along with its user-friendly interface, the program also doubles as a social networking tool, allowing users to share playlists and invite other friends to see what they are listening to. Aside from music, students on participating college campuses will be able to download movies and television shows for free.

However, the program does have limitations: if a user wants to put his or her songs on a portable music player, he or she must have a paid subscription to “Ruckus to Go.” Additionally, the program will not run on Macs without third party software and there is no iPod compatibility.

Brief history of not buying music

It has been more than eight years since Sean Fanning’s Napster arose as the pioneering user-friendly peer-to-peer (p2p) file-sharing program in the late 90's. After subsequent copyright violation lawsuits and an injunction from the RIAA, Napster shut down in July 2001. The RIAA represents copyright-holding record labels and is the music industry’s copyright infringement watch-dog.

Since Napster’s closure, countless other decentralized p2p file-sharing programs such as Kazaa, Gnutella, and Fast Track have risen and fallen in the wake of its success. Permanence, evidently, is not a trait that is associated with these types of p2p programs.

Ruckus, which is funded by advertising revenue, is based on the idea that students would rather steal music than pay for it. The new service allows students to download free music legally. The company has been providing its services for the past three years to participating colleges that are willing to dedicate server space and pay for a subscription. It began allowing students from any college to use its services earlier this year.

Advertisers who wish to use Ruckus as a venue for promotion have the incentive of breaking into the elusive college, 18-24 year-old target demographic market. Companies such as Discover Card, Microsoft, and Google recently signed up for Ruckus ad space. The revenue generated from advertisements is then used to pay the respective record labels for the number of times a song is played.

Shepard of the flock

Rick Murphy, assistant director of Information Technology and Networking systems, deals with file sharing and network issues on a daily basis. Aside from overseeing network bandwidths, he also deals with cease and desist letters from the RIAA that highlight copy infringement by users on the St. Michael’s campus network. He sees the new program as a smart alternative to p2p sharing programs.

“I strongly support legal alternatives. I think that these types of programs are a smart move from the traditional p2p sharing. I would like to see the Student Association beginning to think about getting into and funding legal file-sharing programs.”

Although many may not realize it, illegal file sharing has been targeted on the St. Michael’s campus.

“Last year we were receiving up to seven cease and desist letters a month from the RIAA requesting an investigation,” Murphy says.

The standardized e-mails Murphy receives from the RIAA include the user's name, IP address, and specific files that were shared or downloaded illegally. It is a process that is expensive for the school and potentially costly for the user. The RIAA sued four individual college students for the first time in 2003, citing $150,000 as the penalty for each copyright infringement.

Although it is possible for Murphy to track incoming and outgoing files he says that is not what the college is interested in.

“It is not the college’s policy to limit student or faculty network use, but the school does not support any illegal activity, including copyright infringement. Once a student is warned for something like this, they are put on record. It’s in the student hand book: using the network for illegal purposes can get you kicked out.”

Student perspective

Speed was cited for downloading three songs as well as uploading two other tracks to other program users. Speed says five other students were also under investigation at the time of her warning.

Luckily for Speed the RIAA dropped the charges. The software that she was using, Kazaa and Imesh, are both downloadable p2p sharing programs. To prove that she was no longer using the programs she had to allow IT to look through her computer, says Speed.

The scare, however, has not stopped her from continuing to download music.

Speed says, “I still download music with other programs, what can I say? I don’t want to pay for my music.”

Kane McDonald, St. Michael’s senior, says, “I’ve been downloading music since high school. Although I’ve heard about kids being sued in other schools I don’t know anyone personally who has had any trouble.”

Although Ruckus offers a safe and user-friendly option, McDonald doesn’t think that it will necessarily revolutionize the way people download music.

“It’s a great idea, but it isn’t as convenient as other programs and it will turn into another place where I am bombarded by advertising,” he says. “The kicker is that I can’t even put the music on my iPod.”