Students living in residence halls will have a free subscription to Napster starting next week in a University effort to educate them about Internet piracy.
For the next year, about 7,100 students will be able to access the legal music provider via a GW web site that will be accessible when classes begin on Sept. 1. The site’s page is gwired.gwu.edu/legalmusic.
The University, which announced its deal with Napster in late July, is among several schools that will offer a legal music program for its students, who have increasingly been the targets of copyright infringement lawsuits filed by record companies.
In addition to being able to view a page with educational reminders about the possible implications of illegal file-sharing, students can also access a Napster media library with more than 750,000 files.
To access the Napster page, students must sign in, complete a survey and create a Napster account with a code given to them by the University. The cost to transfer selected files on to a CD or MP3 player is 99 cents per song and $9.99 per album.
Ordinarily, a subscription to Napster costs $9.95 a month per person. Alexa Kim, director of technology communications for Student and Academic Support Services, declined to comment on the price for campus-wide Napster use but said an anonymous donor is paying for GW’s first-year trial. An identical program being developed at Cornell University carries a $200,000 price tag.
Officials have restricted the availability of the programs to dormitory residents because students living in off-campus apartments are not on the GW network.
“The program is for students living in the GW residence halls,” Kim said. “That’s just the parameter of the program.”
Although Napster is potentially available to all students living in a residence hall, the program only works on personal computers that have Windows 2000/XP operating systems. Because of this limitation, the University has also entered into a deal with Apple’s iTunes, another legal online music service. But while the deal will allow students with Apples to access iTunes, those users will still have to pay a fee for each download.
Kim said the University could not give Apple users Napster-like access to iTunes because iTunes is not a subscription-based service. Rather, it charges customers a per-song fee.
“That’s not their business model,” Kim said. “We couldn’t do it even if we wanted to.”
She said the success of the one-year pilot program would depend on whether students are satisfied with the downloadable songs. If GW decides to end the program after one year, students will lose all the songs they download onto their computer.
“(Extension of the contract) will depend on student reaction,” Kim said. “It will depend on if the music students’ want will be in the music library or not.”
Any technological problems encountered by students when using the program will be handled directly by Napster support. Kim said the University would not provide any support for the system.
Pennsylvania State University launched one of the first Napster pilot programs in January 2003. The program gives more than 14,000 residence hall students access to a free Napster subscription. PSU students were happy with the wide range of songs offered by Napster, leading administrators to develop plans to expand access to more than 83,000 students, including some living in off-campus locations, this fall.
PSU spokesman Tysen Kendig said the university’s pilot program is very popular among students.
Tracy Schario, GW’s director of Media Relations, said the University’s pilot program was also implemented to prevent the recording industry from brining legal action against more students. In March, the Recording Industry Association of America, a music trade group, filed suits against three GW students who downloaded music on illegal networks such as KaZaA and Morpheus.
According to court documents, the RIAA withdrew the suits during the summer. Although lawyers for the music industry declined to discuss specific cases, the decision not to go forward with legal action suggests that the RIAA and the students reached a settlement. In court records, the students were only identified by their Internet Protocol addresses.
Jonathan Lamy, spokesperson for the trade group, said students usually pay an average fee of $3,000 to have a lawsuit suit dropped.
GW is concerned that additional students will face legal ramifications from illegally downloading songs.
But officials also acknowledged that there are no foolproof ways to prevent further legal action because they cannot prevent music groups from suing students that use illegal downloading networks.
Louis Katz, GW’s executive vice president and treasurer, said the University might be reducing students’ exposure to future suits by introducing the pilot program.
“If we’re doing more than others are, we’re going to look better,” Katz said. “What we’re doing is a prudent move.”
The University’s pilot program is sponsored by the Campus Action Network, a Sony affiliate. GW is one of six universities that signed on with Napster in July as part of CAN’s initiative to educate students about piracy while simultaneously providing a cheap legal downloading alternative. The other schools that signed up for the program are Cornell, Middlebury College, the University of Miami, the University of Southern California and Wright State.
-Michael Barnett and Gabriel Okolski contributed to this report.
