What does every college student like better than music? Free music. In recent years students turned to Napster for a solution to avoid paying top dollar for new CDs by artists like J.Lo and U2. In no time at all, music lovers turned a simple file-sharing Web site into a national phenomenon.
But in 2000, recording artists including Metallica and Dr. Dre sued Napster over violating copyright laws. After numerous federal court rulings, in February 2001 the U.S. District Court in San Francisco handed down an injunction requiring members to pay in order to access the site and download music. This proposed monthly fee is rumored to be about $5 and will benefit the artists, label companies and the producers.
During Napster's lawsuits over copyright violations, some colleges banned Napster from being accessed by the student body. However, Napster remained available for students at the University.
"U.Va. did not regulate Napster, shut it down or block access," Honor Committee Chairman Thomas Hall said. "The University's approach to this issue was that if it regulated Napster, it would have to regulate everything else."
Downloading music, however, is considered stealing and therefore constitutes an honor offense. Although students are aware of this, many continued to download MP3 files.
"No cases ever came before the Honor Committee," Hall said. "Although it is seen as breaking the honor code, as a whole, the student body is willing to tolerate this action. From the University's perspective, since the University trusts students not to cheat on tests, they regard people who use Napster as generally honorable students."
First-year students had to take the Responsible Computing Quiz at the beginning of the year in order to obtain their e-mail password. This test alerted them of the honor code violation of downloading music. But many first years still choose to download, perhaps not from Napster, but from the many file-sharing sites that have emerged in the aftermath.
"I'm not paying $15 for a CD to listen to one song," first-year College student
Sara Klinepeter said. "It's not like I'm burning songs onto a CD and selling them to my friends. I make play lists that I listen to myself."
Many students were in shock when they heard they would no longer be able to download free music via Napster, while others remained confident that the Internet would provide more free music opportunities.
"I was frustrated at first," third-year College student Adele Bruce said. "I thought, 'Where can I download songs now?'"
Other students were convinced that Napster-like alternatives would inevitably become available, and that it would not be long until these new sites became popular.
"I thought another company would step up and find the market anyway, so I wasn't worried," third-year College student Jared Warren said.
Warren's speculation was correct, thanks to a plethora of sites that allow file-swapping fans to download music for free. A wide variety of sources have emerged out there on the Web, but each has its share of advantages and disadvantages.
One of the most well-known and accessed services is Audiogalaxy (www.audiogalaxy.com). With its unique "satellite" system, Audiogalaxy allows registered users to download music from any computer, while the song is automatically sent to the computer where the user's satellite was originally saved. Due to the praise that Audiogalaxy has received in the past few months, traffic on the site has been high, resulting in slow or stalled searches.
Although a filtering system has been used, users can get around it by misspelling artists names, such as "Madona" instead of "Madonna," so the program does not recognize it. Downloading music has not been blocked entirely.
"I heard of Audiogalaxy through word of mouth," Bruce said. "There are some copyright restrictions on Audiogalaxy, but if I keep looking, I can usually find the song that I want."
Second-year College student Kate Gordon is an avid user of Audiogalaxy.
"It makes it relatively easy to choose music from different categories and pick popular songs," she said.
Not everyone is as crazy about it, though.
"With Audiogalaxy, you have to go through too many screens to find a song," fourth-year Commerce student Steph Wilson said.
One of the most innovative peer-to-peer networks is called Morpheus, which is accessible through one of two programs: Kazaa (www.kazaa.com) and Music City (www.musiccity.com). Both of these applications can download files from several sources simultaneously. This allows for faster downloading times than rival servers, and both programs also have a resume function so users can pick up where they left off before. Searching for songs on these sites also is easy due to its user-friendly interface that allows for quick follow-up searches of other songs and albums by any group.
"It's really versatile and fast," Warren said about Kazaa. "There are other kinds of files available to download also, like movies and videos."
Other students praise Kazaa for its simplicity in accessing the software.
"I use Kazaa because you don't have to download any software," third-year College student Anna Roberts said.
The downside of Kaaza is that it limits the size of downloadable MP3s, so the quality of the sound is less than that of a CD. Music City currently has no filters on file size in place.
"I use Music City because it has everything I want on it from a good music selection to videos," Klinepeter said. "It's convenient and quick."
BearShare (www.bearshare.com) and LimeWire (www.limewire.com) software were created in order to alleviate technical misunderstandings on the Gnutella network, a system similar to Napster, by simplifying the file searching and downloading process. A unique facet of the Gnutella network is the "monitor" feature, which allows users to see what files other users are searching for simultaneously.
"Some genres aren't as well represented on Gnutella as they were on Napster, but the most current music is readily available," third-year College student Paige Barfield said. "However, download times can be a little longer than what a college student on the go is willing to sit around for. Rarely can you get a song in less than a minute. For me, that's a major drawback."
Despite the large amount of resources available on the Web to download free MP3s, there is the chance of contracting a computer virus. Since file-swapping sites allow access to so many files, every computer becomes a perfect target for a computer virus if one of these files is infected.
"Peer-to-peer file-sharing through programs like Napster allow for the spread of viruses that could potentially harm someone's computer and then spread all over the network," said third-year College student Chris Husser, who is an ITC senior computing advisor.
Husser advised downloading a virus protection program like Norton AntiVirus, which students can get for free from the ITC Web site.
"It is also important to keep the virus protection up to date," Husser said. "If a student doesn't update their software, it's almost like not having any protection at all."
With so many choices for free music offered, the loss of Napster may not seem tremendously devastating to the student body. In the future, as lawsuits are brought against the new front-runners of file-swapping technology, new sites probably will pop up allowing students to continue their lifestyle of downloading music free of charge.
Although, as more diverse and random sites become available to public access, users must be careful that the files they download are virus-free, or else the price of this free music may be too much to bear.
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