“Sale: $9.99 CDs!” the sign at Best Buy proclaims. Yet you can still find me there, pacing back and forth, grumbling about the insane amounts of money they expect me to dish out for a lousy 12 tracks and refusing to purchase a thing. Such has been my life since the downfall of the mighty DC++, where free, lightning-fast downloads of music, TV shows, movies and more were the norm.
Perhaps I’ve been spoiled. I came into the university with the hub running smoothly and efficiently, and I can’t help but feel a little lost without the file-sharing service. After all, most of us grew up with Napster before it was banned and in the age where kids and teens find ways on the Internet to find free software, movies and especially music. And since the ultimate freeloading service was pulled from under our feet, there aren’t many legitimate replacements to turn to.
The university has been attempting to push online music download service Ctrax on us to substitute for our use of DC++ for quite some time now. It is a part of a larger media community called Cdigix, which provides downloads of movies and other services at a price. The community targets college students and offers its services to 42 universities in the country, including Duke, Yale and Rutgers. The music service Ctrax boasts music downloads that are free and fast without the risk of adware or spyware.
While it sounds like a great system on the surface, it has some gaping holes. First of all, the music you download cannot be played without being connected to the Internet and logged into the Cdigix website. This means you cannot burn your music onto CDs, transfer it to an MP3 player or even save it onto your computer. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the site is only fractionally as comprehensive as DC++ was. With thousands of students connected to one hub sharing all of their accumulated files, the hub had more than 40 TB (the equivalent of roughly 80 billion MP3s) of data being shared, while Ctrax lists just more than 2 million different MP3s.
Considering all of this, I wonder whether the university was actually just joking when they presented this service to us. Did they really expect us to compare Ctrax to DC++ and find it remotely adequate? The only thing Ctrax has going for it is the fact that it’s legal, and to many university students, that’s not nearly a big enough selling point.
Even now that DC++ is gone, we will turn to other similar programs such as Kazaa, Limewire and BitTorrent before we attempt to settle for Ctrax. These programs, while not as quick as DC++, still allow free unlimited and permanent downloads. This is a problem for the university and its students not only because it’s still illegal, but because the risk of being infected with spyware and adware is very high with some of these programs. For students as well as Office of Information Technology, clearing these viruses could be a major inconvenience. And even if the enforcement of the ban on using these programs is strict, there will always be alternatives. Websites such as YouSendIt.com allow the free e-mailing of complete folders to another person, making complete CD transfers not only possible but easy.
If university officials want to even start thinking about fully eliminating the copyright infringement activity going on at the university, they’re going to have to do a little better than Ctrax. Providing discounts on legal services such as iTunes and the new Napster would be an acceptable starting point, as these programs allow you to actually own the MP3s you download. Promoting a substandard service such as Ctrax is not going to eliminate the illegal sharing of copyrighted materials at this university, it will only encourage users to find other ways to get free music.
Megan Maizel is a freshman philosophy major. She can be reached at mmaizel@umd.edu.
