Due to a high volume of illegal file-sharing among students, the University of California and the California State University systems have jointly asked companies to bid on a contract to provide online music access to students. The two universities view a legal downloading program as a chance to further deter students from engaging in illegal activity, according to UC Office of the President spokeswoman Abby Lunardini.
“File-sharing notices are definitely trending upward,” Lunardini said. “A lot of colleges across the country are facing increasing pressure to stop illegal downloading. … [A legal service] would be one more tool in the arsenal.”
The two systems hope to hear back from vendors, such as Napster, by spring, allowing the campuses that choose to take advantage of the service to do so beginning in the fall quarter, according to Lunardini.
Depending on the offers, the university would likely choose between two main content provider types. The first would be a program such as the one currently in use at UC Berkeley, which allows students to use Rhapsody — a private online music provider — at a discounted price. With this program, students would pay a monthly fee of $2 and an additional 79 cents per song. The second possibility would charge by the song and have no monthly fee.
As at UC Berkeley, any service would be optional for students, as well as for individual campuses.
“This is just a way to leverage the combined sizes of the systems to get a cheaper cost,” Lunardini said. “It will be up to the individual campuses to decide whether they want to use the services.”
Whether the students or the university will pay for the program will also be decided when the offers are reviewed.
“Obviously, we’re a public institution and we would like to keep cost to students at a minimum, as well as [the] cost to the school,” Lunardini said.
However, the efficacy of a program in combating the problem of illegal file sharing is still uncertain, according to UCSD Academic Computing Services Director Anthony Wood.
“Any program that we establish will [consider] only the interest of students who are trying to do things in an honest way,” said Wood, who is also a Digital Millennium Copyright agent, meaning that he handles all notices of copyright infringement on campus.
Eleanor Roosevelt College freshman Valerie Locke said she also remained skeptical about the effectiveness of the program.
“College students don’t have enough money to pay a dollar for each song when they could just download it for free,” Locke said. “Only the students who are already paranoid about getting caught would [use the service].”
At UC Berkeley, not many students responded to the offer, although the university has not determined why, according to Wood.
“It’s hard to say whether it’s due to lack of interest or lack of marketing,” Wood said.
The UC system, however, will continue with its current efforts to undermine illegal file-sharing, according to Lunardini, mainly through information sessions held during new-student orientations.
“[This program] is one tool that might help mitigate the problem over the long term, just like you’ve seen with iTunes in the larger market,” Lunardini said. “But technology is changing so quickly and other things are changing so quickly that it is hard to say at this point what will help.”
