In an effort to curb illegal file sharing, the University of California agreed this month to permit Napster and other online music vendors to offer university-based services on its campuses.
Although UCSD is currently not in negotiations with Napster, administrators are in the final stages of approving a deal with another legal Internet music provider for fall 2005, according to Academic Computing Services Director Tony Wood.
The university system wrote letters to several online music retailers such as Napster, asking for a legal file-sharing service to curtail illegal music downloading on campus, and received responses from four of them, Wood said.
Among the four vendors were Napster and Cdigix, but UCSD is only considering the Cdigix offer at this time, according to Wood.
“We are negotiating with Cdigix, and that should be set up by the end of fall quarter,” Wood said.
He said that Cdigix works like most other Windows-based subscription services, but would not comment on pricing because financial terms of the deal are currently tentative.
Cdigix, a service exclusive to college campuses, offers four areas of digital media: Ctrax, a music library of 1.5 million legally downloadable songs; Cflix, for video media from companies such as ESPN; Clabs, which distributes educational media; and Cvillage, which handles campus media distribution, according to a Cdigix press release.
“The commitment by the universities to introduce Cdigix to their students is yet another show of support of the entertainment industry’s fight against piracy,” the press release stated.
UCSD is not expected to accept Napster’s offer because it would force the university to pay expenses that Cdigix agreed to cover, Wood said.
However, the company remains optimistic that other UC campuses will accept its bid.
“We have been talking with a bunch of UC schools,” Napster spokesperson Avery Cotler said. “We are in talks, but I just can’t comment until the deal is done. So far, we have almost 29 campuses online and now we have just partnered with Dell and XM Radio. We are a small company, but we are music people. We have the deepest catalog of songs and we have good relations with various artists.”
Several universities, including UCSD, have been courting legal file-sharing networks in response to the Recording Industry Association of America’s crackdown on college campuses for illegal file sharing.
Last year, the RIAA sued 27 UCSD students for downloading music illegally. The students facing litigation from the RIAA were using the “i2hub” network, which is based on Internet2 — a technology exclusive to 200 college campuses. Although i2hub limited its access to only Internet2 users, students who used it to download music illegally were targeted by the RIAA.
“There were more than a couple students [who faced legal troubles] with the RIAA,” Wood said. “By the end of spring we turned in the names of [about] 25 students. Once [they contact us], it is out of our hands. They sent us a subpoena and we were obligated to respond.”
Wood said that if illegal file sharing is detected on an IP address located at UCSD, the owner of the copyright for the material could contact him with a warning and that he would pass it on to the user.
Students who had been sharing large numbers of files were warned, and subsequently sued, by the RIAA.
While RIAA spokesperson Amanda Hunter stated that most of the students sued last year have already settled, she would not comment on the dollar amount of each settlement. Currently, 16 of 27 individual users at UCSD have settled out of court, according to Hunter.
Although UCSD is expected to offer students access to discounted subscriptions to Cdigix and possibly other vendors, Wood said he expects the RIAA to continue to monitor the practices of UCSD students who download music illegally.
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