A legal way to listen

If you own a computer and a pair of headphones, chances are you've stolen music. You're not alone. As this editorial is written there are 1,609,904 users logged on to Limewire sharing thousands of gigabytes of pirated media on the popular peer-to-peer file-sharing network. One of those users might be accessing the Internet through an IU server, which could put the University at risk under the watchful eye of the Recording Industry Association of America.\nHowever, the University doesn't consider the risk great enough to warrant the current alternative to online piracy: legal music services. Students seem to be of a similar mindset, especially when faced with the possibility of more fees.\nWhile most students acknowledge that downloading pirated music is illegal, few are ready to give up the luxury. Buying things gets expensive; is it any surprise that free stuff, especially music, attracts so many college students? Just consider how many freshmen are lured to Welcome Week every year by the call of free food. If IU was to go the way of Purdue, Stanford or the University of Michigan and offer a subscription to a music service, the legal music must have all the advantages of stolen music.\nThe subscription should be optional. For some students, the legal downloading will be just another charge on a long list of irrelevant fees for unused University services. But it's not just the money; in fact, a nominal fee (less than $2 per month) for unlimited usage wouldn't be out of the question as long as students are able to keep the music at the end of their subscription.\nMany legal online music vendors use proprietary file formats so that only the vendor's software will play the music. For instance, music files from Apple's iTunes Music Store are in AAC format as opposed to the more widely used MP3 format. This means that music from the iTunes store can only be played on Apple iPods and the computer. The proprietary file formats also prohibit users from listening to the music after a subscription to the service has been canceled.\nThere is also the issue of content. Students won't be willing to pay a dime if the selection doesn't accommodate a wide variety of tastes. A contributing factor to online piracy is selection; there is simply a wider range of music available illegally. A music store without any music just won't do, nor will a store that only sells music. Services like iTunes and Ruckus offer video content, including movies and television shows. The future is, of course, in portable-pay-per-view television and there's no reason to lag behind the curve.\nFor the time being, however, most students seem perfectly satisfied to grab and hoard what they can, cross their fingers and hope the RIAA isn't tracking them. It's not necessarily that students enjoy breaking the law and stealing music. It's that we hate paying for it. We want to support our favorite musicians, but we don't want to foot the bill for production costs and profit margins. Hypocritical? Whatever. It's free -- and the University would have to offer a sweet deal to compete with that.