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« Chilling Speech With Take Down Notices | Main | Sony v. Sony »

October 10, 2004

Comments

I think this is a great idea. But not without reservations. For the on campus students, since the fee is paid by the residence halls, I assume every student is subsidizing the service equally through their tuition and/or boarding fees, even if they don't download any music or few songs? And supposing it does become very popular, as it just might, because it is completely legal, wouldn't the school's bandwidth be bogged down by all the [legal] downloads?

For the off campus students, why would they pay for this particular service, because it will cost $3/month + $0.89/song. It would be cheaper through, say, Realnetworks, which I think is only $0.79/song. I can see, however, the potential for such a service to really reduce the illegal downloading significantly.

I too think this is a good idea, with good potential for stepping up legal downloads and curbing illegal ones.

I just wanted to make a quick comment regarding the first comment made to this post. A great incentive for the off campus student to pay the subscription fee of 3 dollars a month is because they would have access to unlimited free downloads so long as they not burn or transfer the file. They would be granted the capability of trying out all the music offered by the service for free. This allows the student to decide whether or not the song is actually worth .89 cents. With Realnetworks you have to pay for the song up front and are then stuck with bill whether you enjoy the music or not. Or you may subscribe to RealRhapsody, which works much the same as cdigix subscription service does, however it costs 10 dollars a month.

I found this doing a search for people having problems with Cdigix's DRM, so forgive a comment on an old post. I am a Purdue student and while the selection Cdigix offers is rather nice, some people complain that it's only 128 kbps WMA. I've done a fair amount of listening by now and I have no real complaints with quality. Their DRM, however, is horrible. The licenses almost invariably time out after about two weeks, requiring you to, as far as i've been able to find, re-download the song. According to the company this is not supposed to happen and the songs should be good for the duration of your subscription. Their suggestions of signing into the service before playing to refresh licenses is no good. I suspect it is a problem on their end, either in the license encoding or server maintenance.

-A Purdue Student

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