University continues ban on Napster

IU banned Napster for a second time April 20 after the University was threatened with a lawsuit from the heavy metal group Metallica. Now Georgia Tech has decided not to ban Napster, because university officials feel a ban would be impractical. "At a university like Georgia Tech, such a solution is impractical. Further, even if we found a temporary method, our students are bright enough to find ways around it," according to a statement released by Georgia Tech.\nBut IU officials said Napster will continue to be off-limits.\nSenior Matt Cramer said he agrees with Georgia Tech's decision.\n"Right now I do not see anything wrong with sharing files, so I don't think (Napster) should have been banned," Cramer said. \nChristopher Simpson, IU vice president for public affairs and government relations, said Napster was banned for legal reasons.\n"There are technical legal ramifications of having a site like Napster up, and these are still unclear," Simpson said. "The courts will decide this and everyone is watching with great interest."\nHe said the focus is not on the intelligence of the students.\n"It is not an issue about the smartness of the students, because ours are among the brightest in the world," Simpson said.\nMark Bruhn, information technology policy officer for University Information Technology Services, said he agrees with Georgia Tech's assessment because blocking any application is impractical from a technical standpoint.\n"We don't feel, from a cultural standpoint, like we should block anything unless it is in self-defense of the University," Bruhn said. "The legal situation surrounding (Napster) is unclear and concerning legal issues could be taken against the students."\nThere are other Web sites that many students are using in place of Napster, such as Scour.com, mp3.com and imesh.com.\nCramer said he uses both Scour and iMesh to download music from the Internet.\n"It is a lot easier to use Scour because you just type in whatever song you are looking for, and it gives you places where you can download the song," Cramer said. "I also feel that the whole banning of Napster is irrelevant, because people find ways around it, which is obvious, like Scour."\nHe said there is a way to still use Napster through a program called Napigator despite the ban, but he doesn't like it as much because it is slow and doesn't work as well as Scour.\n"Instead of turning your computer into a server, you can gather songs from Napster, but people can't grab the songs from your computer," Cramer said. "It basically sets up a server other than the Napster server, which pulls the music from the Napster server to the new server."\nBruhn said they are now watching Scour and are going to try to prevent it from being a problem through education.\n"We want students to learn about Scour and to use it properly and legally," Bruhn said. "However, if we get complaints about people using Scour or any other application in an illegal way, then we will investigate it. This has been our practice for many years and it will continue."\nHe said the outbound usage is very high, so unless they can get students to decrease usage of the site then they might have to take technical action to restrict use.\n"We have limited outbound traffic to 15 megabytes per second, and we reduced that to 10 percent (Wednesday)," Bruhn said. "This way we are limiting the amount of information from Scour that the people outside of the University can get, because the problem is more with what the outside world is getting so we are limiting the information taken from the University."\nHe said UITS suggests that students limit their use and that they not serve files to the Internet community.\n"There is a parameter that can be set in Scour that keeps other people from seeing the person's files on their desktop," Bruhn said. "Under options under media library there is a check box that says do not share my files with the Scour exchange community."\nCramer said he sometimes checks this box on his Scour.\n"I turn the file sharing off during the day to cut down on network traffic, but if I am up late at night like two or three in the morning then I go ahead and turn it on," Cramer said.\nBruhn said Napster would stay blocked until the legal situation is clarified.