On February 6, 2009, the Ruckus Music Service shut down without warning.  This service (which had been adopted by Syracuse University to help curb music piracy) provided a legal way to download music and other content using a subscription model with a $15/semester individual fee.

There were many limitations in adopting Ruckus as the solution to the music piracy problem (see below).  While other proprietary services (e.g. Apple's iTunes®, Real's Rhapsody®) are still available, SU administrators worry that the apparent demise of Ruckus and the expense of the other orthodox alternatives will result in a reemergence of the music piracy problem.

1. Advertise more widely the vast (and growing) universe of legal, less-expensive (or free) alternatives for downloadable content.
2. Restore the balance between the profit motive of powerful corporate content industries and the rights of individual citizens to share and remix the cultural productions we own in common.
3. Educate students not only on commerce-driven licensing models and the sanctity of "intellectual property," but on alternative licensing models and the profound importance of the public domain and freely redistributable content to cultural vitality.
4. Segregate more clearly the legal use of powerful tools such as Limewire and BitTorrent from their illegal use (which is based solely on the copyright status of the shared content, not on the tools themselves).
5. Empower students—not just as consumers, but as producers—with the diverse array of options they have for generating, sharing, remixing, and licensing content in less proprietary ways.

Archive.org — Welcome to the Archive's audio and MP3 library. This library contains over two hundred thousand free digital recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Many of these audios and MP3s are available for free download. 

ccMixter — ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want.

Jamendo — On Jamendo artists allow anyone to download and share their music. It's free, legal and unlimited.

Librivox — LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain...volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain into digital audio (eg. mp3), and then make the audio files available to the world, for free (through our catalog, a podcast, and bittorrents).

Magnatune — We work directly with independent musicians world-wide to give you downloads of MP3s and perfect-quality WAV files. We never work with major labels, and our musicians always get 50%. You can listen to every album in its entirety before buying or becoming a member.

MusicBrainz — a community music metadatabase that attempts to create a comprehensive music information site. You can use the MusicBrainz data either by browsing this web site, or you can access the data from a client program — for example, a CD player program can use MusicBrainz to identify CDs and provide information about the CD, about the artist or about related information. You can also use the MusicBrainz Tagger to automatically identify and clean up the metadata tags in your digital music collections.

MusicDNS — provides a simple, easy to use method for acoustically identifying digital music and acquiring the correct metadata. Leveraging patented acoustic recognition technology, MusicDNS consistently identifies the same digital music recording, regardless [of] language or audio file format...Our track level fingerprints are finely tuned for accurate matching, and eliminate the cost and challenges of legacy CD data...Free licenses are available for non-commercial use.

Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads —You don't need to worry about getting sued by the Recording Industry Assocation of America or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many independent and unsigned musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans.

Amarok — Amarok is a powerful [and free, and open source] music player for Linux and Unix, MacOS X and Windows with an intuitive interface. It makes playing the music you love and discovering new music easier than ever before - and it looks good doing it! [This is functionally equivalent to Apple's iTunes.]

Daisy — a multipurpose sound player for embedded applications. It can be used as a standalone personal music player,as the sound for an art project, in a kiosk, as a museum tour guide, in a toy, or anywhere that high quality embedded audio is desired...This is an open source project, with minimal protections reserved via a Creative Commons license.

gtkpod — a platform independent Graphical User Interface for Apple's iPod using GTK2. It supports the first to fifth Generation including the iPod mini, iPod Photo, iPod Shuffle, iPod nano, and iPod Video.

MusicIP Mixer — a tool that performs the "fingerprinting" of individual tracks using the MusicDNS service (above).  This enables automated playlist generation and facilitates the identification of unlabeled tracks and the correction of faulty or missing metadata. [Note this software is free but is not open source.]

Rockbox — an Open Source replacement firmware for portable digital audio players [including several iPod models].

Rhythmbox — an integrated music management application, originally inspired by Apple's iTunes. It is free software, designed to work well under the GNOME Desktop, and based on the powerful GStreamer media framework. [This is functionally equivalent to Apple's iTunes.]

Syracuse University has been one of many schools to collectively receive potent threats from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Business Software Alliance (BSA), the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), and especially the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), who have demanded that these schools assist in tracking down and prosecuting students participating in copyright violations.  The RIAA has issued threatening letters, initiated litigation, provided leads to the FBI, and even mounted a broad propaganda campaign targeted for distribution within educational institutions.  These efforts have been thoroughly documented in the mainstream press, in scholarly literature on Internet law, and in the trade literature of higher education. 

While administrators at SU—in particular those at the Office of Information Technology and Services—are understandably anxious about these threats, their approach to dealing with the problem has remained not only ineffectual but a disservice to the students and the University community as a whole.  These efforts (as represented, for example, in the rather anemic ITS pages on Filesharing and the University Committee on Copyright) have (in my opinion) leaned too strongly in the direction of:

• emphasizing the potential ramifications of illegal filesharing and intellectual property infringement
• highlighting prominent cases in which perpetrators were caught and punished
• recommending that entirely legal filesharing tools (e.g. LimeWire, BitTorrent) be disabled or removed entirely
• directing students to the largest corporate providers of legal content (Apple, Yahoo!, and the RIAA itself)

Whatever the motivations and technical or legal constraints that have yielded this approach, it is obfuscating and dysfunctional at best (for all the reasons thoroughly documented in the references below).

This page represents a minor attempt at depicting an alternative approach.  The University should take the lead in enabling students and faculty as content creators and situating corporations as ultimately subservient to civil society.

Creative Commons — Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved." We're a nonprofit organization. Everything we do — including the software we create — is free.

Free Software Foundation — founded in 1985, [FSF] is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software—particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants—and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux.

RIAA Radar — The RIAA Radar is a tool that music consumers can use to easily and instantly distinguish whether an album was released by a member of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)...Just as people can currently find out where some products come from and who made them (Is this banana organic? Does this milk contain growth hormones? Were these clothes made in a sweatshop?), it is important to have that knowledge for as many consumer goods as possible. Knowledge is power, and knowing where the product came from can (and should) influence what you buy.

Recording Industry vs. The People — [A blog by New York City business attorney Ray Beckerman] about the RIAA's attempt to monopolize digital music and redefine copyright law, by bringing tens of thousands of extortionate lawsuits against ordinary working people.

MIT Open Courseware — MIT OpenCourseWare is a free publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT.

Students for Free Culture —The mission of the Free Culture movement is to build a bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture, rather than a top-down, closed, proprietary structure. Through the democratizing power of digital technology and the Internet, we can place the tools of creation and distribution, communication and collaboration, teaching and learning into the hands of the common person — and with a truly active, connected, informed citizenry, injustice and oppression will slowly but surely vanish from the earth.

Aoki, et al. "Tales from the Public Domain: Bound by Law?" Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Duke University Law School (2008).

Electronic Frontier Foundation "The Battle for Your Digital Media Devices" — Major entertainment companies are locking up the audio and video content you own and taking away your rights.

Electronic Frontier Foundation Filesharing page — Tired of the entertainment industry treating you like a criminal for wanting to share music and movies online? We are too — EFF is fighting for a constructive solution that gets artists paid while making file sharing legal.

Special issue: Music and the Internet. First Monday (July 4, 2005).

Frost, R. "Rearchitecting the Music Business: Mitigating Music Piracy by Cutting Out the Record Companies" First Monday, vol 12 #8 (Aug 6, 2007)

Lee, T. B. "Piracy Statistics and the Importance of Journalistic Skepticism" Freedom to Tinker [blog], Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University (October 9, 2008).

Lessig, L. "Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity" The Penguin Press (2004).

Maney, K. "Apple's iTunes might not be the only answer to ending piracy." USA Today (Jan 20, 2004)

Rampell, C. "To Catch a Song Thief: Inside the Anti-Pirate Patrol" Chronicle of Higher Education (May 23, 2008)

Rampell, C. "Antipiracy Campaign Exasperates Colleges" Chronicle of Higher Education (August 15, 2008)