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Penn State Students Pissed Off About Napster Deal
from the ooops dept
This probably wasn't what administrators at Penn State were expecting after working out the deal to let on-campus students access Napster music streams without charge to the students. Instead of being happy, many Penn State students are pissed off at administrators for wasting their money. Despite the Penn State claims that the service is "free", clearly the university is paying for the service, and those fees will be reflected in tuition - or at least, they'll be withheld from something else on campus. The students say they don't want to be forced to pay money to a recording industry they don't agree with, who is giving them something of extremely limited value (no downloads, just a limited choice of streams - and only if you happen to be on campus).
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University spending
Universities love to blame lack of support from State governments for all of their problems. Meanwhile, the State's spending is far more transparent than the university.
My big question to the university is this: Before they spent time and resources to create this "service" did they ever bother to ask whether the services was wanted? How many other programs are being funded that are unused and unwanted?
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What's the Correct Tradeoff?
You mention that students feel the university is buying something they don't want, and they will have to pay for it somehow. This suggests FAILED the tradeoff is:
- Penn provides freeee music
- Students will pay less for other music, come out ahead. (Only they WON'T save because this free music does not meet their desires.)
I believe the above is not what happened. The actual tradeoff is:
- Penn feared costly lawsuits due to students copying music.
- Penn feels it will spend less on such lawsuits if it can get students to listen to music it provides free; overall costs to students will drop.
The students should be pissed that in the current legal environment, Penn can reasonably make such decisions. The driving force in this devil's bargain is the RIAA and the music publishers, not Penn's administration.
- PB, precision-blogging.blogspot.com
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