Spanier: Napster agreement to meet student demand, teach integrity

Spanier: Napster agreement to meet student demand, teach integrity

Op-ed by Graham B. Spanier
President, The Pennsylvania State University

Many college students believe that the best thing about the Internet is music. More specifically -- free music.

At colleges and universities across the nation, students are provided high-speed Internet access as part of their educational experience. Computer networks have greatly facilitated communication among students and faculty and have enabled new research and teaching methods.

Free music was not exactly on the list of benefits university presidents originally contemplated providing through our advancing technologies. But as recent experience has shown, vast amounts of entertainment are accessible via the Internet -- like it or not -- to today's children, youth and adults, including millions of college students.

The Internet has not only changed the way we educate, but it also appears to have shifted America's thinking about the moral code surrounding what has come to be called "intellectual property." Being able to download music and movies without paying for them is seen as just another perk of technology, because "things on the net are free," aren't they?

Need directions? Go to Mapquest. Need information? Call up Google, type in a word and up pops a flurry of helpful sites. Want music? Turn to KaZaa, the largest file-sharing service in the United States. It's all just a click away from your desktop.

But music piracy is nothing more than online shoplifting -- the willful taking of someone else's creative work. In short, it's stealing, and I believe there are a number of reasons that educational institutions should help find a solution to this copyright infringement, the most compelling being that piracy is wrong. If we allow students to leave college without comprehending this message, we are failing a generation in more ways than one.

Ethical standards should not be considered simply a matter of individual choice. What we communicate to the next generation will largely determine if we will live in a just society. Honesty, integrity, respect for individual achievement and working for the common good are all values that students should have when they leave college.

Despite our education efforts related to piracy, and the technical interventions that limit the amount of downloading a student can perform, many students still partake in illegal downloads. Turning a blind eye to the illegal uses of the technology does not seem to be a suitable option, particularly as students put themselves in jeopardy with the law.

That is why Penn State has just kicked off a new initiative to provide students with a legal way to download music files, becoming the first higher education institution to launch a comprehensive alternative solution.

Through a special partnership with Napster, which recently established itself as a company that legally offers music online, Penn State will begin providing unlimited access to music files to all of its students by fall 2004. This pilot program will offer music files in four different ways -- unlimited free streaming (listening), tethered downloading to the hard drives of the students' computers, downloading music to a portable device, and allowing students to buy individual songs for permanent use for an additional fee.

The university will pay the fees for everything except tracks purchased permanently. The service also will be available to faculty, staff and alumni at a discounted rate.

As co-chair of a committee composed of higher education leaders and music and motion picture executives, I am excited by this program that provides a legitimate alternative to piracy and promises to curb the theft of intellectual property on our campuses.

It is my hope that other campus-based programs like the one just launched at Penn State will be adopted at other colleges and universities across the nation, raising awareness of copyright issues, teaching our students about integrity, and proving that the higher education community still values ethical behavior on its campuses.