The aim is to curb ever-growing illegal music sharing within university's network and also to curb the increasing external bandwidth requirements the school has to cope with as its students use broadband connections from their dorms to download music from P2P networks such Kazaa.
And apparently, the service has been quite a success. School reported that three days after its launch, service had generated over 100,000 downloads or streaming requests from the students and already 2,600 of school's 17,000 eligible students had registered with the service. School plans to make all of its 83,000 students eligible to the service by this fall.
Of course there's a catch in form of DRM. The deal between Penn State and Napster doesn't allow students to burn the music on CDRs, but need to pay a fee to do so.
Source: CNN
Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 14 Jan 2004 15:05
