Ruckus: an alternative to illegal file sharing
Ruckus, a music-sharing site that allows students at participating universities to download free music legally, is now available to UA students with an active UA NetID. Faculty and staff wishing to download music from the site will pay $8.99 per month.
The agreement between Ruckus and UA, negotiated and made technically possible by OSCR, was recently inked and now members of the UA community can have access to over two million songs once they establish an account at www.ruckus.com. Ruckus offers unlimited downloads, downloads of albums in less than one minute, exclusive artist news and interviews and the ability to create and share customized playlists.
At present, Ruckus is supported exclusively by Windows 2000, Windows XP and Vista operating systems and songs are copyright protected, meaning they can’t be played on many popular portable music devices, such as iPods. Nevertheless, Ruckus provides a great opportunity for students to listen to their favorite tunes legally and for free.
The Associated Students at The University of Arizona (ASUA) will assist in the formal introduction of Ruckus to the UA Campus when it hosts Cat Fest, an annual student-welcoming event, on August 24.
The Ruckus agreement was motivated, in part, by the university’s desire to mitigate the proliferation of illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing on campus. As more and more media become available online and students become savvier in ways to download and share files via P2P file sharing programs, college administrators nationwide are forced to grapple with issues of copyright infringement on their campuses.
At the same time, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is increasing the intensity of its efforts to protect artists’ materials from illegal downloading. Although infringement complaints constitute a legal matter solely between RIAA and the alleged infringer, RIAA recently sent a letter to university presidents across the country asking for assistance disabling P2P programs when their use is detected, delivering settlement letters to users of university computers identified as copyright infringers and preserving any relevant electronic records should attempts at a settlement fail and the matter ends up in court.
Universities are not legally required to comply with RIAA’s requests for assistance in these efforts, but most administrators see illegal P2P file sharing as a disturbing trend and are actively seeking ways to minimize the instances of illegal downloading on campus.
UA is currently ramping up its efforts to combat the problem through education and alternative sources of free music, such as Ruckus. In support of these efforts, OSCR is currently designing a new webpage on its site to answer, in plain non-legalese English, the questions that students most frequently ask about the issue: What is P2P file sharing? What constitutes infringement? What are the risks and penalties? How can I avoid problems and protect myself? This new page will also feature portals to Ruckus and other sources for legal downloading, many of them free.
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