Campus debate over Napster continues as test reaches halfway mark

By Bill Steele

Cornell students have developed a love-hate relationship with the Napster online music service: A lot of them love it, and a few hate it. Whether the Napster service is continued is very much up in the air, with several other services being considered. But in the meantime, it seems to be saving bandwidth.

Since early fall, students have had free use of the Napster service. A campus-wide site license, mostly paid for by an anonymous corporate donor, provides students with streaming and downloading access to the company's library of more than a million songs for the school year that began in September 2004, along with access to interactive, commercial-free radio stations, six decades of Billboard's chart information and an online magazine.

The free trial is available only to students, not faculty or staff. As of Dec. 13, 100 days after the start of the service, Cornell Information Technologies (CIT) reported that 8,955 students, or about 60 percent of the eligible student population, had signed up. New registrations continue at the rate of about 13 a day. Over 5.9 million tracks have been played, stored and streamed to date, averaging 5.6 tracks per student per day.

Napster uses Microsoft's digital rights management system, which causes the music files to "expire" when the user ceases to subscribe to the service. To retain a track permanently or burn it on a CD the user must pay the usual 99 cents per track. Napster is available only to computers running the Microsoft Windows XP and 2000 operating systems, and is compatible with about 60 brands of portable digital players that use the Microsoft system. That does not include the popular iPod.

While many students have said they are very pleased with the system, Dean of Students Kent Hubbell says that in his experience, Mac users are "uniformly unhappy." He said that whatever system is adopted should be available to all members of the campus community. Also, he said, there are a few students who dislike on principle the idea that access to the music is temporary, expiring at the end of the program.

Cornell has been approached by several other vendors, according to Robert J. Bourdeau, assistant director of marketing for CIT. "At this time we're still wide open," he said. The university had approached Apple Computer about finding some arrangement to use its iTunes service, but Apple so far has no special program for universities.

The Cornell Student Assembly has formed an ad-hoc committee, the Legal Music Downloading Committee, to investigate other possible service providers. The committee plans to organize three forums during the spring semester to discuss the issues, under the general title of "Freedom with Responsibility." The first will invite experts from the industry and the press to debate on digital copyright. "The idea is to empower students with the necessary information required to make responsible decisions," said assembly member Joseph Rudnick, who is organizing the forum. "At a time when legitimate music service providers are greatly expanding their services and the industry is cracking down on illegal downloading, this forum is essential in exploring a topic that is so relevant to college-aged students."

Later forums, still in the planning stages, are expected to address free speech in the media and academic integrity. Eventually, vendors representing several music services will be invited to present demonstrations, after which the assembly will make a decision, possibly after holding a student referendum. Hubbell said that eventually all potential vendors would be asked for specific proposals.

The expectation is that the cost of whatever service might be adopted would be added to student activity fees. That would run around $20 a year per student for Napster. The normal subscription cost of the Napster service is $9.95 a month. Some students have objected to the idea of paying for a service that not everyone uses and that some are unable to access at all. The student activities fee is currently $167 per year for undergraduates, $62 for graduate students. Adding $20 to either would represent an uncomfortable jump, Hubbell pointed out.

"Because the student activities fee is paid by all students, the leadership of this assembly will not find any solution acceptable that does not include all students, said Josh Bronstein, assembly vice president for finance. "If legal music downloading is to become a part of the student activities fee, every student, including Mac users, must have access."

An added benefit to Cornell during the Napster trial has been a reduction in off-campus Internet traffic. Cornell pays an external service provider for the capacity to move traffic between the campus network and the wider Internet, and students who download from remote music sites add to that traffic. Napster uses a local cache server with about a terabyte of storage. The cache server stores the most commonly downloaded tracks, and when those tracks are requested the download comes from the cache server, with no impact on off-campus traffic.

Installation of the cache server in the Cornell "server farm" in Rhodes Hall was fairly straightforward, according to Michael Hojnowski, manager of system administration. "We plugged it into Cornell's network like an appliance," he said. The complete installation took about a day. Administration is handled remotely by Napster. From here on, Hojnowski said, "Our job is to manage the equipment and make sure it gets power in a cool room."

So far, between 30 and 80 percent of traffic is going to and coming from the cache server. Napster predicted cache use would level off at around 92 percent. New music and students' changing taste in music changes the rate each month.

Apparently the service has had little impact on traffic between the campus and the wider Internet. Cornell uses a system called Network Usage Based Billing, which bills students and department users based on the amount of off-campus traffic they generate above 2 gigabytes. This fall, Bourdeau said, only about a dozen students went over the 2-gig limit, and for all those users, he said, Napster represented only 2 to 3 percent of their total off-campus traffic.