Ruckus provides legal, free downloads
Tech has a new downloading service called Ruckus that allows students to download free music.
"The contract is for three years, so they can download the music for free for three years," said Tim Gallager, President of the Residence Hall Association.
The initiative was started two years ago to bring free music on campus as a legal option for downloading music.
"There were a lot of reasons behind this. People are getting sued for downloading illegal music, so SGA wanted to bring in a legal alternative. Instead of eating up bandwidth by downloading from off-campus servers, Ruckus actually located a server on our campus," Gallagher said.
Aaron Marr, the Campus Services chair for the past two years, worked out a contract with Ruckus and negotiated a three-year contract. Ruckus normally only offers a six month contract.
"The contract with Ruckus was approved by GT Legal at the beginning of the summer and then by the middle of the summer, we were eligible to sign up," Gallagher said.
According to Gallagher, OIT granted permission to locate a server on campus and allowed a 100 megabytes per second connection.
A mass email was sent to the students informing them of Ruckus. Within the first four hours after the email was sent out, 2337 people signed up.
"The campus server was running at the maximum bandwidth for the first eight hours," Gallagher said.
Approximately 6000 students have signed up to the new system, and over 1.5 million songs have been downloaded onto Tech's campuses.
"Ruckus is absolutely overwhelmed; they've never had it take off on a campus that much in any of their releases. It was by far the best release that Ruckus has had at any university," Gallagher said.
The system had some problems shortly after its release. In the first eight hours, lots of people signed up and the website would not load. Also, people had trouble downloading licenses.
"Ruckus wasn't prepared for an uptake of 2300 people in the first four hours. I emailed the campus Ruckus rep at 10 p.m. and spoke with the Ruckus CEO. The problem was fixed by 5 a.m. the next morning. The campus rep is absolutely phenomenal," Gallagher said.
Ruckus server on campus has 50,000 of the most popular songs; the library itself has over 1.5 million songs and it grows daily.
"They offer a movie service that's an optional add-on service that students have to pay for, and RuckusToGo is a service that allows students to add songs to an mp3 player," Gallagher said.
The faculty and staff can also use this service, but for a fee.
While many students have signed up for the service, students have mixed opinions whether or not it will prevent illegal download.
"I don't use it but I know kids that do and they like it. It probably will deter people from downloading illegally," said Aaron Blood, a first year Biomedical Engineering major.
"I think it's a good idea and I think it will deter people from downloading," said Austin DeNoble, a first year Computational Media major.
According to Jeff Creviston, a first year Management major, he downloads the music and plays it on his computer, but he can't put it on his iPod.
"I don't know if it really deters people," Creviston said.
"From what I can see, it looks like a good idea. I was deterred away from it at first because I thought it was a spam trap. I found out that to my dismay, it was for Windows only. Their solution for that was to run Windows XP for a Mac, which I wouldn't do, just for Ruckus. I don't think it will deter people from illegal downloading. Just because you have the song doesn't mean you can put it on your iPod. It will stop a lot of people but there will still be illegal downloading," said Matt Treager, a second year Civil Engineering major.
Ruckus users cannot burn the songs onto CDs. Ruckus revenue comes from banner ads on their player and website. Ruckus has many add-on services, which require payment, such as RuckusToGo, which allows transfer of music to mp3 players, and special movie providing services
Songs can also be bought from Ruckus for 99 cents, just like I-tunes.
Ruckus users have to download a Ruckus player that's required to download songs and licenses. However, they can use the player of their choice to actually play the songs.
Ruckus does not work on Apple Computers or with Ipods.
