Campus soon to offer legal downloading
By JUDY LIN
UCLA Today
Faculty, staff and students may choose from a range of downloading alternatives
Digital pirates will have more good reasons to go legit this spring when Apple iTunes, CDigix and Mindawn offer the UCLA campus a spectrum of alternatives to illegal downloading of music, movies, videos and game software. These vendors will offer discounts and other benefits to the faculty, staff and students via B-Legal, a collaboration among Communications Technology Services, Housing, Office of Information Technology and Student Affairs.
The B-Legal initiative seeks to offer the campus community a legal way to access entertainment media to serve a growing digital culture and to put UCLA at the forefront of what is becoming the business model of choice for these services. In so doing, UCLA also hopes to reduce the incidence of copyright infringement claims and the probability of lawsuits leveled against students by the music and movie industries.
“We are pleased to offer students legal services that put us on track with the emerging ways that music and movies are now enjoyed,” said James Davis, assistant vice chancellor and CIO, UCLA Office of Information Technology. “This also rounds out how the campus is addressing the risks of illegal file sharing. Offering these services is an essential component of our three-pronged approach to addressing illegal file sharing.” Also part of this approach are education and a “quarantine process” of temporarily restricting external Internet access when UCLA is notified that a student’s computer is being used to share copyrighted media.
Jonathan Curtiss, UCLA’s manager of technology development for Student and Campus Affairs, led the effort to bring legal file-sharing services to campus. Input came from a 12-member work group of students, faculty and staff as well as surveys of residence hall students in 2004 and 2005.
“We learned that students are very interested in legal services, especially if they can purchase or rent music at a discount and play it on portable devices such as iPods,” said Curtiss. “Also, they want signing up to be an option — not mandatory.”
Most students did not want campus or housing fees to increase to cover the costs. “We made every effort to provide a discount price or other advantages compelling enough for students to forego illegal downloading,” said Curtiss, “while not costing UCLA and not affecting student fees.”
CDigix, which offers more than 2 million song tracks as well as movies and videos, will charge 89 cents per music track plus a monthly subscription fee. Television to the desktop, video-on-demand and an extension to various portable players are additional services.
Apple iTunes will charge its customary 99 cents per song track but will rebate 5% of all UCLA purchases to the campus; the current plan is that UCLA student councils will share the proceeds equally and distribute them to student groups.
Mindawn, which specializes in royalty-free music from independent artists, will offer discounted downloads of 99 cents per 10 minutes in a variety of CD formats. In addition, Mindawn will waive the uploading fee for UCLA students, allowing them to freely distribute or sell their music over the site.
All faculty, staff and students with valid UCLA IDs and Bruin Online e-mail addresses will be able to access these services from computers on and off campus.
As new pricing, services and vendors become available, they will be taken into consideration, said Curtiss, who noted that the current vendor contracts will run for just one year.
“This is an evolving, nascent industry,” he said. “We will continue to look for the best possible services.” |
