In its new report, “The Campus Costs of P2P Compliance,” the Campus Computing Project makes clear that many colleges are spending a lot of money — more than they’d like — to keep students from downloading pirated music and movies. But one of the report’s most interesting findings concerns what colleges aren’t paying for: legal alternatives to peer-to-peer piracy.
Just three of the 321 institutions surveyed for the study reported spending money on a legal music or movie library, says Kenneth C. Green, the Campus Computing Project’s founding director. That number would almost certainly have been higher in 2005, when dozens of colleges had purchased licenses to use commercial services like Napster, Cdigix, and Ruckus. According to an Educause survey from that year, nearly one in five institutions were considering signing a contract with a legal downloading service.
So what happened in the past few years? Napster has all but abandoned the collegiate market, and Cdigix discontinued its music and movie libraries. In the meantime, Ruckus shifted its business model: It now pulls in revenue from advertisers and lets college students sign up for free.
Source: Wired Campus (Chronicle of Higher Education)
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