Provost Participates in Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Panel

On Thursday, November 6th, 2003, Provost Phelps was one of four panelists participating in a discussion on Peer-to-Peer File Sharing at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Anaheim, CA.

Other panelists included Cary Sherman, President of the Recording Industry Association of America, Graham Spanier, President of Pennsylvania State University, and Jack Valenti, President and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America. Approximately 6,500 attendees were expected at the conference.

Click here to view a streaming video of the panel discussion at Educause (requires Real Player).

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Joint Committee on Peer to Peer File Sharing

Related News Stories on P2P

Read Provost Phelps' editorial on peer-to-peer file-sharing, reprinted from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, February 16, 2004.

Discussion with Provost Phelps regarding plans for an online music service at the University

Provost Charles E. Phelps, who chairs the Technology Task Force of the national Joint Committee on Peer-to-Peer File Sharing, discusses some of the plans for an online music service for students at Rochester.

Does the University plan to provide a service for students to download music to their computers?

We have been exploring the possibility of partnering with an independent, commercial service that would offer a legal, convenient, and affordable way for students to have access to music files via the Internet. At this stage of negotiations, I think it's premature to mention specific companies, but the idea is that students would receive a membership in a service and have access to the service's music files just as other members of the service do. Because of the large volume of potential customers represented by students at Rochester, we think we can negotiate a significant discount on any monthly charges that students would pay for access to the service. Students would still have to pay the per-song or per-album cost of buying music from the service. Right now, the going rate is about 99 cents per song, but I'm confident that as the market for these services grows, competition will bring that price down considerably.

When could students see such a service?

There are several steps yet that we have to take, including deciding which music service to partner with. But we hope to conduct a pilot study in the coming semester to test a service and to gauge the response from students. Depending on how the pilot goes and assuming that students find the service worthwhile, it could be available next fall.

Who would have access?

Our initial plan is to make the service part of ResNet, the network that process Internet access to students (nearly all of whom are undergraduates in the College or at the Eastman School of Music) in the residence halls. We have talked about making it available more broadly to the campus community, but that would be several years down the line.

What are you looking for—and not looking for—in a music service?

We are shopping, so to speak, for the same attributes as most consumers: convenience, affordability, breadth of choice in the company’s catalog, compatibility with our computer systems. We are not interested in services that only allow students to stream music to their desktops. We want students to be able to buy the files and to be able store the music on their hard-drives and to burn the files (at least once) onto other storage media. We also do not plan to make the system available on the University’s wireless network.

How much would the service cost and how would it be paid for?

It’s premature to try to estimate the exact cost to individual students for the service, but we will do our best to keep any additional costs as low as possible. As I mentioned, we expect to be able to negotiate for a significant discount based on the number of students on campus. I hope to discuss with student leaders both the desirability of the service and the ways we might pay for it after the pilot phase. (The pilot phase will involve no charges to students, assuming that we move ahead.) The costs would be significantly less than 1 percent of tuition.

Why is the University looking at this as an option?

There are a number of reasons why this is an attractive alternative. Chief among them is that it would give students a legal and convenient way to download music rather than relying on P2P programs that could expose them to the legal risks of violating copyright laws. Another benefit is that it may help us better manage the University’s network bandwidth. As file sharing has become more prevalent, we have seen the percentage of our bandwidth being used to share music files, for example, grow to the point that such traffic often slows the network’s responsiveness, making it difficult for other users to get their work done.