Students who participated in the Napster pilot-program at The University of Tennessee were generally positive regarding the file-sharing service, according to Office of Information Technology officials.
Administrators, Student Government Association president Curtis Sanderfer, vice-president Megan Welch and faculty met Friday to discuss the partnership between the university and Napster that existed last spring.
According to the results of surveys sent in by students to OIT, they liked the program, but “their biggest complaint was slow response, but that was rectified early in the semester,” Brice Bible, OIT chief information officer, said Sunday. “Another problem involved a pop-up blocker issue with the Napster client. Napster agreed to correct [it] as soon as possible.”
The program began in January, allowing students who reside on campus to install the Napster client and download music from other file-sharing computers on the network. Only students living in residence halls were allowed to participate in the program.
Bible said that 1,800 students used the service on a regular basis, with 4,500 downloads per day.
Napster is an alternative to other peer-to-peer services who have suffered from the questionable legality of downloading free copyrighted music and vexatious software that installs itself with the P2P client and opens unsolicited advertising windows, also known as spyware.
The Recording Industry Association of America has filed lawsuits for copyright infringement against numerous P2P client users for downloading and trading copyrighted music.
“Napster is legal because they have licensed the content from the major and minor music labels,” Bible said. “Napster is much faster, does not result in RIAA lawsuits and does not create spyware and virus problems like the illegal P2P services.”
The meeting also touched upon the program’s future at UT.
“We will discuss the current status with the Chancellor [Loren Crabtree] and make a final determination if the program will continue during the fall,” Bible said.
“If we continue, the fall program will be the same as in the spring. However, Napster has offered some new features such as napster-to-go, which allows a student to download tracks to an MP3 player that manages digital rights. Napster also announced a partnership with Dell to offer these MP3 players at substantially reduced prices.”
Bible added that there will be no subscription fee for the fall program should it proceed and spoke about the success of the spring program.
“The faculty, staff and students at the meeting on Friday believed the spring effort was relatively successful,” he said. “However, all parties involved could have done a better job in marketing the service as well as the benefits of legal digital rights activities for students and the university. The goal will be to market the program to all students early and often during the semester.”
Tim Rogers, vice chancellor for student affairs, spoke about his objections on the way the service was advertised to the students.
“I expressed some concern that the marketing effectiveness was not as strong as it could be,” Rogers said. “We didn’t do a good job letting our students know it was available.”
In the end, Rogers said that the students, whose interest in Napster’s proposition in launching a pilot program at UT led to the trial, will decide if the program will continue.
“We’re going to look to students to ask if they’d like to proceed,” he said.
