CAMPUS

Downloading Music the Legal Way

Last spring, a dozen William and Mary students received letters threatening lawsuits from the Recording Industry Association of America. All were accused of illegally downloading music.

In light of these events, the Student Assembly (SA) began work on ensuring that students at the College have affordable legal options for downloading music and other types of entertainment.

In December 2007, SA President Zach Pilchen sent out an e-mail notifying students that the College had finalized a partnership with Ruckus, an ad-supported digital entertainment service that offers free music and video downloads to college students.

William and Mary students can register with their William and Mary e-mail addresses at www.ruckus.com to begin using the service.

According to Chris Utah, director of subscriber acquisitions for Ruckus, the company is “the only online music discovery service that provides free downloads to college students.”

Unlike other online music providers that only offer free previews of songs and charge up to $150 per year for subscription services, Ruckus allows students to download over three million different songs from both popular and indie music artists at no cost after registering at the site.

The Ruckus Web site states that all downloads are “100% legal, virus-free and spyware-free.” Ruckus also recently added a free video download service for subscribers with music videos, TV shows and films.

SA Senator Walter McClean, chair of the Senate finance committee, has played a key role in bringing a Ruckus server to the campus and in promoting the service to students.

At first, Mr. McClean talked with SA members and many other students about their experiences with downloading music. After determining that Ruckus would be a valuable and useful service for students at the College, he contacted representatives from both Ruckus and the College’s Information Technology department. Mr. McClean then facilitated communication between both sides in order for a contract to be worked out.

For the past few months, Mr. McClean has been actively working with Ruckus to publicize the service through Facebook, school-wide e-mails and campus mailbox flyers. Mr. Utah says that before promotional activities began in December 2007, there was not a single Ruckus user at the College. Now there are over 3,500 William and Mary subscribers on Ruckus, or about 47% of the College’s total population. As of January 21, 2008, students at the College have downloaded a total of 894,357 songs from Ruckus.

Although Ruckus is actually open to any US college student with a valid .edu e-mail address, Mr. McClean says that William and Mary’s partnership with Ruckus is beneficial because it includes a special server on campus that “increases download speed and reliability for William and Mary students.” This new internal server moves the substantial downloading by the College’s students on Ruckus to the campus’s internal network, thus improving Internet speed for both Ruckus users and non-users on campus.

Mr. Utah believes that Ruckus is a good service for college students because “students don’t generally have the money to pay for a new album or song just to see if they will like it, and with all of the legal action that the recording industry has been taking against college students, they are moving away from P2P and other illegal means of downloading.” Students can play the music they download through Ruckus on their computer, and for an optional fee of .79 to .99 cents per track, they can transfer the music to some MP3 players or burn their tracks to CDs. At the moment, Ruckus downloads are incompatible with Apple’s iPods.

In the upcoming year, Ruckus plans to fix incompatibility issues with Macs.

More TV shows and full length movies will be added to the video download service. A new feature called “Match and Snatch” will be beta-tested at the College and four other schools affiliated with Ruckus. This feature will let Ruckus users view music recommendations and find members with similar musical preferences based on the music they have downloaded. Ruckus also continues to heavily promote its networking features through its “My Ruckus Music” application for Facebook. Ruckus users can post their top-ten lists, recently played tracks, and most played tracks on their profile, and check out their friends’ favorite tracks as well.

Mr. McClean remains committed to promoting Ruckus at the College. “If we can push a service that means unlimited free music, and reduces the likelihood of William and Mary students being sued for thousands of dollars, I think it is someone’s responsibility to encourage it,” he said.

Megan Locke is Arts & Culture Editor for The Virginia Informer, a Collegiate Network publication at The College of William and Mary. This article was originally featured in the January 30, 2008 issue of The Informer.