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The “Nittany Napster” Model
11/12/2003
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.
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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