More Top Picks Honda Vs Champion Generators
player ready...When colleges and universities around the nation installed Ethernet connections in dormitories, it was with the clear intent of helping students search the Web in pursuit of knowledge, communicate with their professors and, when money ran low, e-mail home for some fast cash.
Little did anyone foresee that these cinder-block row houses, crammed with televisions, stereos, refrigerators, microwaves and computers, would play a major role in the titanic media copyright struggle over Napster, the song-swap company.
The legal battle has been portrayed as David vs. Goliath, pitting more than 20 million music lovers against some of the biggest entertainment companies in the world–Seagram’s Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music Group, EMI and Bertelsmann AG’s BMG. The Napster loyalists have lacked some definition. Wired magazine said the federal court decision by U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel that attempted to shutter Napster “turned millions of politically apathetic youngsters into electronic Hezbollah.”
Now the University of Wisconsin at Madison has provided some clarity to the situation through its daily measurement of broadband use–namely how, how much and when people are tapping into the university’s Internet system.
Late last Friday afternoon, 25 percent of the university’s bandwidth was Napster traffic. That’s more than the university’s Web traffic, more than file transfers, more than e-mail, more than any other use of the Net.
And that’s not an unusual volume of traffic, said Barry Orton, professor of telecommunications at the Madison campus. Orton, speaking at a two-day conference of the Practicing Law Institute in Chicago last week, said the volume of traffic devoted to Napster has been growing since the first of the year. In early March, Orton said, the typical Napster traffic consumed 20 percent of the university’s bandwidth. What goes on in Madison is mirrored at other universities.
This is not a phenomenon driven entirely by college dormitories, Orton said. The desire to upload and download music is the primary force behind the growth of high-speed Internet connections to the home. People want music and they don’t want to wait for it, Orton said.
But the dormitory connection is a big and entirely unexpected part of the movement, defined on a daily basis by the university’s monitoring. “Nobody knew what Napster was when Ethernet services were put in the dormitories, and they didn’t know it would be used for entertainment purposes,” Orton said. That is in keeping with the original Internet surprise–that the most popular use of the Net would be the pursuit of pornography.
Orton said the university considered pulling the plug on the service because of concerns about the bandwidth supply being overtaken by Napster, but that was not a practical solution.
“It took the World Wide Web eight years to reach this point and Napster has exceeded it in a year,” Orton said. He likened the traffic monitoring read-out on the computer to restaurants during weekends and happy hour and libraries at finals time.
A federal appeals court heard testimony earlier this month on the effort to put Napster out of business A decision could come next month. But in Internet circles there is a growing sense that the phenomenon may be too powerful to stop. In the October issue of Wired, John Perry Barlow argued that copyright protections will not survive “the Napster Bomb.”
“Neither the best efforts of Judge Patel–nor those of the Porsche-driving executives of the Recording Industry Association of America, nor the sleek legal defenders of existing copyright law, will alter this simple fact: No law can be successfully imposed on a huge population that does not morally support it and possesses easy means for its invisible evasion,” Barlow said.
Election ad deluge: Pity the poor voters in Michigan and Missouri, especially those who watch a lot of television. Newscasts may give them a sense of the tight electoral struggle on their home turf, but nothing like the barrage of political TV ads they have seen.
A new study this week from New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice showed the St. Louis and Kansas City TV markets ranked first and second in the number of political TV ads aired, 33,627, from Jan. 1 to Oct. 10.
Three markets in Michigan–Detroit (ranked 4th), Grand Rapids (6th) and Flint-Saginaw (7th)–aired a total of 37,723 TV ads. That’s about 133 per day. And that was with four weeks left in the campaign.
Viewers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, the three largest markets, did not qualify for the top 10 ranking.