November 12, 2003
LAMP v. PSU/Napster
One thing I was thinking about when writing my most recent post on PSU/Napster was LAMP – not LAMP exactly, because it’s a limited service, a legal kluge (see this nice post here), created for somewhat different reasons than PSU/Napster – but rather the concept of blanket licensing for students’ music access. For reasons obvious to those who frequent this blog, that has some appeal to me. LAMP excited me because it provided a model for what other companies and schools could experiment with, even though this implementation was far from perfect. So, any strict absolutism about what the university must do in all possible circumstances doesn’t really comport with my intuitions.
I am still wary of universities getting over-involved in providing music access, but, as I indicated in my latest post, some instances would be cause for less concern. PSU/Napster troubles me because it is so woefully inadequate and so removed from the university’s mission and similar types of university provided services. If the former were less true and the school were much more necessary to coordinate the purchase (which may be the case with CL-style blanket licensing), perhaps it’d be a different story. In the case of LAMP, the school already had the blanket license and the cable network setup for other reasons; it was a shorter jump to create the service.
Filed by Derek Slater at 8:17 pm under General news
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