The stereotypical question one gets asked at the beginning of a new school year is, "What did you do during your summer vacation?" Me? I’ve spent a good part of the summer working on an agreement to bring a commercial music downloading service from Napster to the students living in residence halls at the University of Washington. It is somewhat ironic that I ended up working on this project, having originally been dead set against getting the University involved in such a situation.
This should have been a classic example of the free market at work – when businesses offering online access to recorded music come up with the right content in the right formats for the right price, university students will surely buy into the program. Wouldn’t it would be interesting to know how many of those half-billion songs that Apple has sold from the iTunes Music Store have been purchased by students?
Unfortunately, we’re not dealing with the classic capitalist markets that our business schools teach to undergrads. The entertainment industry has insisted on making student use of peer-to-peer networks a legal matter, issuing lawsuits against individual students accused of sharing music illicitly over university networks. The threat of lawsuits against our students for their use of university networks has put the higher-education community squarely in the middle of the relationship between consumers and distributors of online music, for better or for worse.
And so we find ourselves dealing with Napster and other commercial downloading services.
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