Ruckus

[Scottie]

I have discovered why I have to pay so much to go to College. It's called Ruckus and it allows me to download any song I want for free with my enrollment in the University.

Apparently, in April this year, my University, Appalachian State University, signed an agreement with Ruckus to create a network for its students to download and listen to any song they want. For me this is a shocking thing. I've been downloading songs for free for so long under the shroud of peer2peer or server based networks, all under the radar, and never completely legal, that this completely legal and endorsed nework is a little scary. To be honest, I gave up music downloading on the majorty when it became a hot topic and people from my school were being tapped by the feds for illegal downloading. I would only use Mytunes, an Itunes plug-in that allows the user to download the songs of people who are hooked into your network (which, in my case is a very large, University sized network with lots of hip college students). But ever since I left the dorms, I've been without such a service. Ruckus changes everything.

If you are a University student, your school might have done the same thing. All you need is a school e-mail address and a PC (won't work on Macs) and you can start downloading almost imediately so long as your school has signed this agreement.

I have to admit, the very first thing I tried to do was see if I could rip these songs to a CD or move them to a Macintosh where I work which has file conversion software (Cleaner 6.5). But it seems Ruckus has put some kind of protection on its files. I'll let you know more when and if I can break this.

Anyways, Ruckus us great. Check it out if you get the chance, and if you are in a University system, see if your school has signed a contract with them by trying to create a new account.

Edit:

In this link is a list of schools that have an agreement with Ruckus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruckus_Network

[dean]

Hehe, I love not having to worry about threat of arrest for this sort of thing [though I don't actually download much music anymore anyway]  Frankly I was really surprised that people were being charged for downloading music in the states, especially since it's so prevalent everywhere that it's never going to be 100% stopped.

Yet another reason why I'm glad our legal system doesn't work like America's.  No offense, but court cases about some uni student downloading a couple of hundred songs is just plain wasteful when resources could be spent on more fruitful cases, like violent crime.  It just seems so stupid having feds chasing up people for what I consider a relativly minor offense.

How exactly do they catch you anyway?  I know nothing of how it works over in the states, so a rundown would be nice.