To discourage illegal file-sharing and reduce the network clutter that often accompanies it, many colleges and universities have entered into contracts with legal music downloading services such as Napster, Ruckus, and Cdigix in the past few years. But early results of these partnerships suggest that many students aren’t taking advantage of the services, mostly because of the constraints these services place on students’ use of digital music.
As a student at Cornell University, Angelo Petrigh had access to free online music via a legal music-downloading service his school provided. Yet the 21-year-old still turned to illegal file-sharing programs.
The reason: While Cornell’s online music program, through Napster, gave him and other students free, legal downloads, the eMail introducing the service explained that students could keep their songs only until they graduated. “After I read that, I decided I didn’t want to even try it,” says Petrigh, a senior at the Ithaca, N.Y., school.
College students don’t turn down much that is free. But when it comes to online music, even free hasn’t been enough to persuade many students to use such digital download services as Napster, Rhapsody, Ruckus, and Cdigix. As a result, some schools have dropped their services, and others are considering doing so or have switched to other providers.
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Because all these services have too many catches if it’s free it probably has a low-quality with DRM and you can only keep the files for so long as this article says.