The “Nittany Napster” Model
Are we at a “tipping point,” or just a smooth place in the road?
At first glance, the Penn State/Napster deal, which gives premium Napster music
service to all Penn State students, is a win-win for all parties. Penn State
gets relief from the RIAA, a nice service for its students, possibly some reduction
in staffing costs relating to illegal Peer-to-Peer issues, and some great PR,
including praise from the House and Senate. Napster gets great PR and something
that was missing in its newly-hatched head-to-head fight with iPod: a built-in
constituency that naturally tends to use Napster services. Plus, the students
get what they're going to make sure they get anyway...lots of music.
But this is not a precursor of the much-anticipated transformation of the music
industry, nor will the deal be without its own issues and problems.
I remember back in the early days of Napster when our work-study students would
come to us and complain that their desktop machines didn't work and we would
discover that the hard drives were absolutely, completely choked with music
files. It took forever to figure out what they were doing and we never did figure
out how to stop them completely. Storage space is not the issue now, of course;
bandwidth and intellectual property are the major concerns.
Some institutions, like the University of Florida, are coping with the intellectual
property issues of file trading by designing programs, like Icarus, that shut
it down. Most are working on educational programs to make better intellectual
property citizens of students, but are running right up against a generational
divide. Penn State, whose president Graham Spanier is co-chair of the Joint
Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities Technology Task
Force, is taking another tack. And it's one that again puts Penn State in the
innovative role, much like it was five years ago when it launched the Student
Newspaper Readership Program that is now embraced by the New York Times and
USA Today and is on hundreds of campuses.
Beginning with the next semester, students in Penn State residence halls are
going to have complimentary subscriptions to Napster's premium service. Penn
State is providing its students with what Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) calls a
"legal online music marketplace...that compensates artists and offers listeners
high-quality music." Leaving aside how well the current model compensates
artists, as opposed to music companies, it appears that Penn State understands
that what we middle-aged Americans think of as a "want" is actually
a "need" for the young people on campus.
Some of the students are already complaining of course, that it's not really
"free," since the cost is paid from their technology fees. But Spanier
is a very smart guy, and those fees are not going up. No doubt Penn State can
afford this because there are some overall IT-related savings from having fewer
legal concerns and the near-certainty that the RIAA will leave Penn State alone
for a while.
And the complaining students who already have iPod or use Macintosh computers,
or who use older versions of Windows, are just reflecting the continuing hardware/software
compatibility war, in which this is a battle where Napster takes some significant
ground. Last week iPod users downloaded something like 1.5 million tunes while
Napster users downloaded only 300,000. A week or two after the new semester,
Penn State students alone will be helping Napster to turn that tide a bit.
Even though one misguided Congressman now thinks that this lets universities
"return their bandwidth to the educational reasons for which it was created,"
clearly there will be significant bandwidth issues that arise when every residence
hall student can demand streaming audio at any time they wish. But that's why
Penn State is starting out with its residence halls only, which use a separate
network and can act as a test bed for what the IT demands might be in the next
academic year when the university will extend the service to all students, faculty,
and staff, and eventually even to alumnae.
So, Penn State wins, (most of) its students win, and Napster wins, for sure.
It's really hard to say who wins the most. And many other campuses are reported
already lining up to follow Penn State's lead.
However, many students don't consider file sharing to be criminal behavior
and will still want to engage in it outside of the "Nittany Napster"
model. Coming to deepen the bumps in the road ahead are issues of DVDs and movies.
Users don't want to "rent" music or movies, they want to own them.
And ditto for software, despite the entirely different history of software sales
and distribution. There still remain deep discontinuities between the traditional
music, movie, software, and related industries and the power that technology
gives to users.
But this is really not the tipping point. This is not a transformation of the
music industry and certainly not a resolution of the larger issues facing intellectual
property creators, distributors, and users in this information technology age.
This solution smooths out the bumps in the road, for a little while, for higher
education IT managers and that's nice. Given the nature of higher education's
relationship with younger generations, which accept technologies as givens and
resist tradition when there is friction between tradition and technology, the
road ahead is still bumpy.
