Students learn 'Digital Karma'

In the Buddhist tradition, your karma determines your fate after death, but at IU it can get you a free iPod.\nAn iPod was just one of many raffle prizes students could win Wednesday at Alumni Hall in the Indiana Memorial Union as part of the University's "Digital Karma" event to educate students about legal downloading alternatives.\n"When students arrive they get a quiz (about downloading), and when they pass it, they get good karma to use for the raffles," said Deputy Information Technology Policy Officer Merri Beth Lavagnino. "Some students are misled with software that claims to be 100 percent legal. The software can be legal, but the music and movies on it aren't."\nConsequences for illegal downloading have started to affect students already. Last March, lawsuits were filed against several unnamed IU students for illegal file sharing.\nMore than 1,000 students attended the event where their queries about technology were answered by the IU Copyright Office as well as representatives from iTunes, the Motion Picture Association and MSN Music among others.\n"We're supporting IU in its efforts to stop illegal movie downloads," said Anne Caliguiri, Worldwide Communications Coordinator for the MPA. "We encourage technology. We understand it's a good thing. We want people to get movies the way they want."\nOne avenue many universities have taken to curb illegal downloading is to team up with a legal provider of movies and music and charge students a small fee to use them.\n"We would consider it if students were interested, but there's just not a whole lot of student interest," Lavagnino said.\nOne such service in attendance at Digital Karma was Ruckus Networks, a legal downloading service that only works with colleges.\n"We take music, movies and TV and localize them to highlight what students want," said David Kochba, with campus relationships for Ruckus. "We update the site four times a day and work with campus media to give it an IU feel."\nKochba said the service, which offers more than 2,600 videos and 700,000 music tracks has spoken to the University in the past few weeks about the possibility of bringing Ruckus to campus.\nHowever, some students weren't quite sold by the much safer and legal alternatives to downloading presented at Digital Karma.\nJunior Andrea Hill said she stopped downloading music a couple years ago when the music industry began filing lawsuits against individual users, but she isn't quite ready to go completely legit.\n"I think it's a great concept, and I don't do it illegally anymore because I'm too scared of getting sued," Hill said, "But I don't want to pay for it either."\nHill did say she liked the idea of the University providing a downloading service.\nOthers were even more pessimistic about the idea of purchasing their favorite tunes online.\n"I like the technology, but I don't know if I'm going to buy music yet," said senior Daniel Gerstenhaber. "As long as you're ahead of other people you can get away with it."\n-- Contact Staff Writer Chris \nFreiberg at wfreiber@indiana.edu.