Ruckus free for students - but at what cost?

Section: Opinion/Perspective
Published: Northern Star, November 9 2007 Issue

When I got the e-mail saying NIU was partnering with Ruckus to give students free music, I wanted to commend the university for trying to do something like this for students.

As a transfer student from Waubonsee Community College, where the administration often went out of its way to make things more difficult for students, this really impressed me.

I still want to commend them for trying, but unfortunately, when I spent some time investigating Ruckus, my optimism turned to disappointment after downloading and setting up the player and seeing how it all worked.

Basically, you have to download the incredibly unintuitive Ruckus player, which meshes with Windows Media Player (only the newest version, of course). After you have that whole mess installed, you can begin downloading music.

The problem with this music, however, is the insanely strict DRM (digital rights management) codes attached to every song.

The songs are given in .wma format, the Windows Media Audio file, which means, you guessed it, they are incompatible with iPods and iTunes.

You can only put the music on “Play for Sure” devices (such as the Microsoft Zune player), and only after you sign up for the “Ruckus to Go” subscription service.

With all due respect to the four NIU students that use “Play for Sure” devices, the rest of the modern world is using iPods, and this music will not play on them.

The songs each have a license that lasts one month, so you have to renew it at that time or the song will refuse to play. Perhaps more aggravating is the fact that you cannot burn the songs to a CD (even once).

So, if you use a CD player or your car as your main source of listening to music, Ruckus is essentially worthless.

Since you can only use the music on a computer and not in a CD player or non-“Play for Sure” device, it also becomes problematic for those of us who don’t do our homework sitting at our computer.

This situation is sort of like giving someone a coupon for unlimited free hamburgers at McDonalds, but the burgers you get can only be bun, ketchup and pickles, without the burger itself.

You want to say thank you, but then you realize you really haven’t gotten anything worth thanking someone for and you wish they hadn’t gotten your hopes up to start with.

It sounds pretty ungracious to trash something being given to students for free, but I want to use this to illustrate a bigger point. The reason this music is useless is because of the copy protections put in place to combat music piracy.

This makes the Ruckus music situation a microcosm of what is wrong with digital music.

Criminals are still going to be criminals. Making it harder to steal music isn’t going to stop them. Instead, they will just put more effort into it and break the codes anyway.

Every version of DRM has been cracked in some way, and this version is no different. It will be broken, and all of this will be for naught.

These so-called “protections” are only inconveniencing the criminals. They are not stopping them. The protections are, instead, putting up roadblocks for legal users.

I buy all my music legally on iTunes, but as more and more companies put ridiculous copy protections on their music, legal users are forced to pay the price for the illegal downloaders who steal music.

Perhaps what NIU should have done was partner with independent artists who would have welcomed a chance to get their music distributed for free. That way they could have accomplished their mission of giving students free music, but without the copy-protection mess Ruckus brings us.