Campus or Subscription Music Services

The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a higher-education funding bill that includes controversial new antipiracy obligations for universities.

The 354-58 vote to approve the College Opportunity and Affordability Act leaves intact an entertainment industry-backed provision, which makes up just a tiny part of a bill that has ballooned to more than 800 pages.

Many Republicans join Democrats in backing legislation to ratchet up scrutiny of college spending and pricing, toughen student loan oversight, and ease aid application.

A steady stream of press releases from the MPAA and the RIAA about unauthorized peer-to-peer downloading suggests that college students are digital pirates and campus network officials are engaged in benign neglect. Yet ample evidence confirms that unauthorized P2P downloading is primarily a consumer market problem, not especially tied to college students on campus networks. Moreover, the media companies with strong ties to consumer broadband providers are themselves at least indirectly promoting unauthorized P2P activity. This is not new: Media companies have a long history of seeking remedy (and revenue) from Congressional action, rather than pursuing marketplace solutions.

This presentation will focus on how Big Music and Big Hollywood have targeted colleges and universities via press releases and Congressional lobbying initiatives while largely ignoring the much larger amount of unauthorized P2P file sharing taking place on commercial networks.

New federal legislation says universities must agree to provide not just deterrents but also "alternatives" to peer-to-peer piracy, such as paying monthly subscription fees to the music industry for their students, on penalty of losing all financial aid for their students.

Can the music go on by offering fans better ways to get music, while guaranteeing payment for its creators? Where have copyright law and its enforcers gone wrong, and what can students, music fans, and co-creators do to put the law back on track?

"When it comes to file sharing and illegal downloads, it's the big music labels that complain the loudest about being ripped off. Bob Moon reports on some ideas that might help the recording industry face the musical future. "

In this report the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) provides a comprehensive look at the four-year litigation campaign waged by the RIAA against music fans. The report traces the RIAA campaign from its beginnings in 2003 against a handful of students at Princeton, Rensselaer Polytechnic, and Michigan Tech to the current spate of "pre-litigation settlement" letters being sent to universities nationwide.

Earlier this year, in what Casey Green called its "spring offensive," the Recording Industry Association of America stepped up its program of bringing infringement claims against thousands of on- and off-campus users of peer-to-peer file-sharing systems. At the same time, the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property held a "Piracy on University Networks" hearing, where one representative warned "the hammer is coming." Meanwhile, forward-looking companies were quietly exploring new business models for distributing entertainment in digital form. Whether based on advertising and ISP licenses, these models take as a given the ubiquity of easy transmission and storage of digital entertainment, both to and among consumers. In this session, we'll explore how the old models are grudgingly giving way to the new, and the implications of this transition for colleges and universities.

Fairfield University has helped faculty incorporate audio and video technology into their curricula to make their content available to students in a digital format. Teaming up with Apple Computer to use iTunes University has simplified the digitizing process for faculty and enabled completely portable content for the students.

With the recent exponential growth of iPods and podcasting among the college-age population, technology-savvy professors have sought to exploit this phenomenon in their classrooms. Since a large percentage of current undergraduates have already embraced the iPod and podcasting (i.e., they own iPods and use iTunes software outside of classes), it seems logical to try to leverage this trend in the academic arena. The question is, how? With all the different hardware and software available that utilizes the iPod and produces podcasts, what is the best way to create digital content from a curriculum so that it can be easily delivered to students and made portable? The answer: iTunes U as implemented at Fairfield University.