Newswise — This fall, students at Michigan Tech CAN always get what they want, music- and movie-wise, without risking a trip to the dean's office or worse, a subpoena.
The university has signed an agreement with the digital entertainment service Ruckus, which will allow students to download music and movies legally.
For $14.95 a semester, about the price of a CD, subscribers will have access to over 700,000 songs. For a rotating library of blockbuster movies and hit TV shows, the cost is $19.95. For both services, the charge is $29.95.
By making Ruckus available, university officials are offering an affordable alternative to illegal filesharing to students living on and off campus. Industry groups such as the Recording Industry Association of American have sued numerous U.S. college students for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by downloading copyrighted material from the Internet via file-sharing sites such as Grokster and Morpheus.
"We are very pleased with this partnership," said Jarrod Karau, Michigan Tech's acting director of information technology. "Part of our role is to educate our students on copyright issues and ethics. By offering Ruckus, we hope to encourage our students to make the right choices by offering an alternative to illegal peer-to-peer file sharing that also improves student life."
"As an alumnus of MTU, I am personally very excited to welcome Michigan Tech to the Ruckus family," said Bill Raduchel, CEO and chairman of Ruckus. "We work hard to be a complete digital entertainment and community network with features that are useful and fun for all students on campus. Through this hard work, and by listening to what the students want, we have shaped Ruckus into a forum for students to meet each other, interact, download music and movies legally, and even share their own creative work and ideas."
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