Napster No Longer Beats On Many Campuses

by Myrka Theard

To many that have used it, Napster is fantastic, harmless, and an inevitable development in the rise of the Information Age, where easy access to anything imaginable is at the touch of one's fingertips over the internet. Lately, however, there has been a heated debate over Napster and its hybrid offshoots, such as Gnutella which are seemingly threatening music artists and the music industry by denying them the ability to make money off of the sale of CDs and tapes. An issue of morality where many contend that internet users shouldn't be able to get something for nothing, Napster has become an economic issue on college and university campuses all across the United States.

Major universities, such as Yale, the University of Southern California, and the University of Indiana have been dragged into the Napster feud, accused of encouraging their students of committing copyright infringement and fraud, since students used the schools' connections and bandwidth to download the music files. Faced with this serious legal threat, the three schools, as well as over a hundred others, blocked access to Napster. One of the universities affected by the use of Napster is Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. Florida State is one of the most wired universities in the country. According to Larry Conrad, Assistant Vice President of Technical Integration, the school first noticed a problem when its bandwidth was increased by 300% from the Spring of 1999 to the Spring of 2000. Questions about usage quickly led to Napster. A demand for extra funds was made to the Provost's office, tripling the storage capacity from 10MB/S a year ago to 30MB/S currently. However, being a state university, where funding comes from the taxpayers' pockets, people, like Larry Conrad believe that accountability of those funds should be found primarily in areas of education and research, and not entertainment.

Since Florida State was already spending $150,000 on their Internet connection, with 920 dial in connections, the University decided to block access to Napster from campus connections. Clearly Mr. Conrad's main reasons for the block was cost, and how tax payers' money should be spent.

The decision was made late in the spring, 2000 semester, just before students left for summer vacation. "We expect to hear arguments from the students in the Fall," says Conrad. Summer session students had similar responses about Napster, they really love it. However, one student, Jenai, 20 and a sophomore, said, "I never really thought about it (artists' side of the argument). I guess there are some pros and cons to Napster."