The Dean of Student's Office announced yesterday that Tufts has joined a pilot program with CDigix, a company that allows students to legally download music onto their computers for the duration of the school year.
Music will be available for download starting today but CDigix follows a "subscription model," meaning the songs students download onto their computers will expire when the school year ends.
Students "renting" songs for free through the CDigix service will not be able to download them onto portable devices, like MP3 players, or to burn them onto CDs.
"The service allows students to download the songs on up to three computers, which must be either a desktop or laptop," Dean of Students Bruce Reitman said. "There are some pretty small laptops out there, though, so portability is still possible."
In order to have ownership of songs, students will have to pay $0.89 per song. Students who purchase songs will be able to put them on MP3 players and on burn them on CDs.
Reitman said song prices would fluctuate according to supply and demand. "We looked at a lot of services and this seems like a good market rate," he said.
The popular iTunes music downloading service currently charges $0.99 per song.
More than 20 universities currently have downloading contracts, about half of them with Napster.
Wake Forest, Duke, and Yale are among the other universities enlisted with CDigix.
"The catalogues of available music were very similar among the different services and they now number over 900,000 [songs]," Reitman said. "We looked at a lot of companies and what it comes down to is that CDigix is the best deal."
The University began looking at music downloading services at the beginning of the summer and the final subscription deal was made possible by an anonymous donor. The details of the donation are unavailable at this time, but Reitman said the University will share some of the program's cost.
"The University does have some costs, but we are [beneficiaries] of this donor and we are very grateful," Reitman said.
Tufts has set up subscriptions to the service for 6,900 students, including all students in School of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering on the Medford/Somerville campus, both undergraduate and graduate.
Because the service is tied to access through University identification numbers and e-mail addresses, students do not have to live or be on campus in order to use the service.
But some students will still be left out of the deal. As senior Andrew Bonaventure pointed out in an e-mail to Reitman, students using Apple computers cannot access CDigix.
"The fact that I am a Mac user excludes me from this service since it requires Windows-exclusive versions of Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player," Bonaventure's e-mail said.
Reitman's e-mail to the student body addressed this issue. "I am sorry to say that there are no services that serve both Windows and Apple platforms - so we had to choose one platform and went with Windows since more than 80 percent of you use PCs," he wrote.
Bonaventure proposed the iTunes Campus service, which he claims is supported by both Macs and PCs. He also warned CDigix requires using the Internet Explorer browser, which the University warned last spring leaves users open to viruses.
Reitman said Tufts looked into iTunes Campus but found that it was not a financially feasible option for Tufts. "[While] iTunes is certainly attractive, it would cost a fortune," Reitman said. "It is not even in the same ballpark."
Reitman also said iTunes offered the University no special deal, as other downloading programs did. "You could call up iTunes and get the exact same rate individually that we would get as a university."
The University's agreement with CDigix allows for a pilot period lasting through the academic year, "with the option of extending service through the summer," Reitman said.
At the end of this pilot period, the University will decide whether to continue the service, depending on any changes in the recording industry and music technology. "It is hard to predict what this industry will be like at the end of the pilot period," Reitman said. "This stuff is changing so fast."
According to an article on Businesswire.com, the service is extremely popular at Purdue University, which recently joined CDigix. "Roughly 150,000 songs were downloaded in the first week that the [CDigix] service was launched with more than 2,000 subscription sign ups thus far. This translates into nearly 20,000 songs per day from Purdue students," the article said.
But students at Wake Forest have hardly used their subscriptions to CDigix. Freshman Tom Haberstro said he was not aware of the program's existence. "If it is available for students, I have never seen it in use," he said.
Starting this month, CDigix will be available to any student with an ".edu" e-mail address, BusinessWire reported. Students not enrolled in a CDigix school must pay $5.99 per month and $0.89 per download.
The movement toward university file-sharing deals was spurred mostly by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), by which schools can be held legally responsible for students who repeatedly download files without paying for them.
A report issued by the Joint Committee of Higher Education and the Entertainment Committee to Congress said students at more than 35 universities have been sued for illegal downloading.
Reitman said Tufts has disciplined students for engaging in illegal file sharing but has not received any subpoenas from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which monitors illegal downloads.
"TCCS [Tufts Computing and Communications Services] uses a system that can pursue complaints given to the school by the RIAA," leading to hundreds of cases a year, Reitman said.
First-time offenders are given a warning and second-time offenders lose their Tufts Internet accounts, limiting their use of the Tufts network to public places, such as the library, and excluding them from residential access.
There are "about two dozen" instances of this disciplinary action every year, Reitman said.
"The University is in the business of promoting ethical behavior among our students," he said. "This service protects the Tufts networks and gives us an opportunity to teach ethical behavior."
According Samuel Haldman, assistant to the associate vice provost at Pennsylvania State, his university signed onto Napster's refurbished subscription service because "the best way [to combat the problem] is to give [students] an alternative in an indirect manner, let them see this is better," he said. "Everybody's getting
royalties."
But some Tufts students doubt the University's subscription to CDigix will curb illegal
downloads.
"I honestly think people are going to download illegally anyway, and the fact that it gets erased after you're not in school anymore makes people lazier in downloading music," sophomore Stacy Davidowitz said.
