Surfing alone, University opens its ears to Napster's electronic tunes

While hundreds of colleges and universities across the country have decided to ban student use of Napster — a music search engine that has received national media attention in recent months — Princeton has taken a more liberal approach in dealing with the issue.

According to a list published on the Website of the Students Against University Censorship — a group that says it will "fight and lobby against the universities' decisions on banning Internet resources" — 196 schools have blocked Napster from their networks.

The University, however, has decided not to restrict use of the service. According to CIT spokeswoman Rita Saltz, "to interfere with information technology goes against what the University stands for."

The Napster software connects thousands of users in locations around the world, according to the Napster Website. The application makes it possible for users to locate and download a wide array of music in MP3 format from one convenient, easy-to-use interface. It also facilitates the process of sharing music collections with other online users.

"Some institutions appear to assume that the use of Napster is illegal. Princeton is not making that assumption," Saltz said. "We are in the business of knowledge and creating new information. We encourage students to use tools at their own disposal in legal and appropriate ways."

"Perhaps Princeton students are more judicious or more busy," she added. "Either way, the University expects students to make their own choices."

According to the Napster Website, the service the program provides is legal because it simply allows users to share information and does not keep the music files on its own servers. In addition, the "fair use" doctrine of copyright law allows consumers to make copies of CDs they own for their personal use.

Saltz noted, however, that Napster poses a unique problem for many college campuses because the application consumes large amounts of network resources. "What I've seen other schools saying is that Napster is interfering with other network programs," she said.

Shawn Sivy, associate director of networking at The College of New Jersey, said the computing administrators at TCNJ decided to block Napster last fall. "We believed that Napster was causing excessive traffic on our Internet services," Sivy said. "Now we've decided to allow access between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., when the network isn't going to be as busy. We're also trying to get new software that would allow student access to Napster on a restricted basis."

Sivy added that he and other administrators at TCNJ did not feel compelled to take action because of other universities' decision to ban Napster. "When we [blocked Napster] we didn't know that so many other colleges were doing it too," he said.

According to Saltz, Tufts University also enforced the ban because of heavy network traffic. "With half of the student population [at Tufts] living off campus, Napster was getting in the way of the flow on Reznet, the equivalent of our Dormnet," she said.

The use of Napster has not excessively strained Princeton's technical resources, Saltz noted. "We've been very lucky that there hasn't been any major problems with our network performance," she said.

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Most students appreciate that the University opposes the Napster ban. "Napster is the most convenient way to find music," Terry Kim '01 said. "Even if they banned it, people would find other ways to get what they're looking for."