The University of Washington will test a combination of hardware and software to try and make legal music downloads the norm.
With college campuses offering fast Net connections to their incoming students, they have indirectly contributed to the robust file-sharing of licensed music. While the recording industry has claimed huge declines in sales, and the Supreme Court continues to turn away opportunities to clear up the legality of file-sharing, students keep on downloading music.
Dell Computers and Napster have partnered on what they believe is the way to wean collegians off the illegal downloading fix. At the University of Washington this fall, Dell will place ten PowerEdge 1855 servers on their network. Those servers will be loaded with Napster’s SuperPeer application.
This combo will provide students with a way to quickly purchase and download music from the Napster service. The SuperPeer application will retrieve songs from a local caching server, which will be populated with content by Napster.
With the downloading work being performed locally, the two companies believe they can reduce the impact of music file downloads on net work bandwidth. To make the proposal financially appealing to colleges, Dell account representatives will sell subscriptions to the Napster service at a discounted academic rate.
“We have no doubt that both colleges and students will benefit tremendously from a solution that combines Napster’s premium digital music service with Dell’s industry-leading technology and services,” said Chris Gorog, chairman and chief executive officer, Napster.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
