Free Internet Music Sparks College Student Appeal

by Sharvon Urbannavage staff writer

College students continue to swap music via the Internet even after the long-drawn legal dispute between Napster and the music industry. The idea of downloading music for free is appealing and convenient for students with little money and high-speed Internet access.

Songs can be downloaded through the Internet in the MP3 format, which makes song files small enough to move around on the Internet in a reasonable amount of time. MP3 CDs can hold 10 hours of music compared to just 74 minutes for traditional audio CDs. Downloaded files can be played on a computer, listened to on a portable MP3 player or burned onto a compact disk.

"I actually like [downloading] better because I don't like buying CDs," freshman Amanda Prostack said. "Usually I don't like most of the songs. When I download, I only do those I like and then make my own mixes."

Sites, such as MP3.com, cannot legally store or distribute copyrighted material for it would be copyright infringement. How- ever, some sites discovered a different way to distribute MP3 files. Rather than storing the songs in a central network computer, Nap- ster allowed users to swap songs that resided on the users' machines.

Napster's defense was that the files are personal files that people

Free Music Sites

1.WinMX www.winmx.com

2.MusicCity: www.musiccity.com

3. FileNavigator: WWW.f i lenavigator.tom

4. MyNapster: www.mynapster.com maintain on their own machines and therefore Napster is not responsible. Since individuals are usually not as concerned about copyright laws as a business would be, a wide variety of songs were available for trade to the entire . world from one's personal computer. "We've been develop- ing a Napster service that offers additional benefits to members of the community and, importantly, makes payments to artists," Shawn Fanning, Napster founder, said.

5.

Many recently developed imitators of the popular music-swapping site are steering clear of the superior technical architecture that constructs the Napster site. Napster is comprised of more than 200 company-owned servers connected to high-speed networks that are used to store indexes of users' file libraries and to answer search requests.

Sophomore Laura Charney, who has tried online music sharing, has decided to 'give up on the entire process. "It was somewhat confusing and a very long process," Charney said. "That's why I don't really download the music."

This centralized file-sharing network is also expensive to build and maintain. WinMX, which launched its Peer Networking Protocol in April, is among the filesharing services that have recently ditched their server hardware and are letting participating users' PCs handle the search and indexing chores.

The music file-sharing phenomenon may soon be halted due to a new encryption technology developed by SunnComm's MediaCloQ and utilized by BMG Entertainment, which represents stars such as Christina Aguilera and Carlos Santana. This technology will prevent CD listeners from converting the tunes to computer files and sharing then through websites popularized by Napster.

Student accesses www.Winmx.com to download songs free of charge. Free music sites are popular amongst college students because they are more practical.

This prevention will not be a dilemma for sophomore Michael Toland. "I just prefer not to [download)," Toland said. "I cannot listen to something over and over again, ~hich is what I would do if I downloaded music."

Though still in the preliminary testing stages, BMG may begin to put the technology on CDs released that reach a wide audience. These efforts may be wasted if hackers, who have worked overtime to break high-profile security systems, succeed in breaking this sophisticated copy-protection technology.