MUSIC PIRACY Penn State develops alternative to Napster craze

Students will be charged a fee for permanent downloads and burned CDs.
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Penn State University, the first campus aiming to undercut the file-swapping craze, will offer students free digital music listening and limited downloading from the relaunched Napster service, music industry sources said Wednesday.
However, if students want to keep a song or burn it to a CD they will need to pay.
The university said Wednesday it had entered into an agreement with an unidentified party to provide digital music at no cost to students. University officials were expected to provide details of the deal Thursday during a conference in Anaheim.
Penn State, which has about 83,000 students on several campuses, has been testing the program with a select group of students, university spokeswoman Amy Neil said. Initially, only the 13,000 students living on campus will be eligible to access the free music, Neil said.
She would not identify the online music service or give further details. Music industry sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the provider was Napster.
A Napster spokesman declined to comment.
Students' involvement
Ian Rosenberger, president of the Undergraduate Student Government, said six students have been testing the service.
"To this point they've been pretty thrilled," Rosenberger said. "There's kind of an all-encompassing effect that some of the illegal services don't have that the students really liked."
Rosenberger said students will be able to stream music at no cost. They will also be able to download a song and move it to a digital music player for a brief period of time for free, he said. Students who want to download the song permanently or burn it to a CD will have to pay a "small fee," he said.
He conceded that some students will probably balk at having to pay for permanent downloads but said many will be satisfied with moving songs to portable music players.
"I'm really excited about the whole thing, and I'm really interested to see how the students like it," he said. "I think we're going to see a lot of different student voices on the whole thing, so we'll get an interesting perspective in the next few months."
Committee strategy
University President Graham B. Spanier co-chairs the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities with Cary Sherman, head of the Recording Industry Association of America. The committee was formed to find ways to curb illegal music swapping on college campuses.
The committee said earlier it was exploring ways that universities could provide free or discounted music to students as a way to eliminate illegal song-sharing through university computer networks.
"[Spanier] is a real leader in this, and he's talked in the past about ways to do this," said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc. "By doing this, they manage to not only potentially block piracy but remove the reason why anyone would want to do it."
He said he knows of no other university using such a strategy to combat piracy but expects other schools to follow suit.
Last week, two MIT students who developed a system to give students in university dorms access to thousands of songs over the school's cable television network were shut down by the university because of concerns that the service was not licensed.
The students said they had negotiated rights for Seattle-based Loudeye to sell MP3s for the system, but the Harry Fox Agency, which handles mechanical licenses for the National Music Publishers Association, said no licenses had been granted to either MIT or Loudeye.
Napster 2.0
Software-maker Roxio Inc. launched Napster 2.0 last month. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company acquired the Napster brand from the ashes of the free pioneer file-swapping service, which was forced to shut down in 2001 after a protracted legal battle with recording companies.
Napster 2.0 users have access to more than half a million songs from all the major music labels. They can download individual songs for 99 cents and albums for $9.95. The service also offers access to unlimited downloads and streaming for $9.95 per month.
It was unclear how much Penn State will pay for the service. Bernoff suggested the university probably would get a discount in exchange for what could potentially be thousands of new customers.