Daily Princetonian ‘Ruckus’ advertorial
p2pnet.net News:- Princeton University’s Daily Princetonian has opened its pages to free advertising.
Ruckus is another of the remora-like companies cashing in on the Big 4 Organized Music cartel’s ongoing attacks on American schools, including senior universities.
With ex-Napster (the corporate look-alike Napster, not the original) coo Michael Bebel as the new ceo, Ruckus is hard-core business, a firm marketing downloads packed with Microsoft’s Plays[not]ForSure DRM consumer control. It won’t work with Apple or Linux systems.
And Ruckus does like its free advertising.
This September it cynically exploited Facebook using a phony student called “Brody Ruckus” who was supposedly trying to get his girlfriend, Holly, to have a threesome with him and another woman.
“If this group reaches 100,000 my girlfriend will have a threesome”, and within a week, the group had reached 100,000, says a Wikipedia post, going on:
” ‘Brody Ruckus’ then promised to post pictures of his sexual encounter online if 300,000 people joined. Within 7 days, the group membership had exceeded 400,000 and ‘Ruckus’ wrote that if the group became the largest on Facebook, he would post a video of his threesome.”
In an interview with eSchool News, Bebel said the Brody Ruckus affair was an, “exercise conducted by one of our marketing teams,” says Wikipedia. And in a letter to the editor of Student Life, the student newspaper of Washington University in St. Louis, Bebel said, “contrary to what has been reported in other media outlets … Ruckus did not use this [Brody Ruckus] profile to market the Ruckus service.”
Of course not! Perish the very thought!
“He also acknowledged that ‘the creation of the Brody Ruckus profile was ill-advised and I can promise that this tactic will not be repeated’,” adds the Wikipedia.
Now, “The illegal downloading phenomenon has been well documented,” says Bebel, writing a blatant advertorial as a ‘guest columnist’ in the Daily Princetonian. He goes on:
These losses have prompted the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to take action, bringing lawsuits against college students and administrations alike for their affiliation with and use of these file sharing programs. Recently, the RIAA sent letters to 700 colleges nationwide, informing those students who ignore warnings and continue to engage in illegal downloading of music that they will be sued.
While hailing the efforts of those schools subscribing to legal downloading services, the RIAA called unauthorized transfer of copyrighted works on campus computer networks “an enormous problem” for the music community. Further, the music industry itself has invested in technology of its own design, deployed across the Internet, to pinpoint illegal file sharing activity and to discover the IP addresses of those who participate.
So, while some may think the problem has come and gone, illegal file sharing remains a serious issue for all schools, including Princeton. Despite the action being taken by the industry and the approximately 150 schools currently subscribing to legal downloading services, the problem isn’t going away. In fact, industry observers estimate that currently, more than 25 million songs are illegally downloaded daily. This translates into roughly $4.5 billion worth of pirated music annually, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). More than a third of the illicit activity is taking place on college campuses. Furthermore, the growing popularity of illegal movie downloads is adding new fuel to this fire.
One may question the logic and effectiveness of suing the very people who ultimately may be the music industry’s best customers. There has to be a better way to legally share and distribute digital content. To that end, the most popular and most trusted online digital media service for college students – Ruckus – from Ruckus Network, Inc., is now available at Princeton through a partnership between Ruckus and the school’s administration and Office of Information Technology. This changes the landscape in a very significant and very positive [for Ruckus] manner.
As the first legal peer-to-peer file sharing service on U.S. college campuses, Ruckus allows colleges and universities to provide legal music and media for both entertainment and academic purposes. Ruckus delivers more than 1.7 million songs to hundreds of thousands of students nationwide. Additionally, faculty can use Ruckus to easily and inexpensively deliver music to their classes. The cost to Princeton and its students for this service: $0. Ruckus pays for the music that we deliver out of our advertising proceeds.
For the administration at Princeton, Ruckus solves a fundamental computing and content distribution problem as it has done at more than 100 colleges and universities across the country; including Georgia Tech, University of California at Berkeley and University of Oklahoma. Princeton now has an attractive legal media downloading option and can reduce its external bandwidth usage through the available Ruckus cache server.
Illegal media consumption and distribution has to stop. Otherwise, the creators of the content that we all enjoy will no longer have an economic incentive to continue. Fortunately, attractive and proven legal options that have mutual benefits for students, faculty and administrators, as well as the support of the music community, do exist. We are working closely with Princeton’s administration to bring Ruckus to your school community quickly, safely and inexpensively. Our partnerships with other schools lead us to believe the Princeton experience will be a great one. We’d appreciate your ongoing feedback and suggestions so we can continue to make Ruckus work for everyone.
If you have any observations for Bebel, who was once ceo at Pressplay, the ill-conceived Sony Music Entertainment/Universal Music Group joint venture, you can email him at mikeb@ruckus.com.
Meanwhile, Facebook dumped the “Brody Ruckus” profile. Will the Daily Princetonian similarly delete Bebel’s bald-faced, entirely self-serving ‘guest columnist’ feature?
Don’t hold your breath.
(Thanks, Georgia)
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
Also See:
Daily Princetonian – Helping you legally download, December 15, 2006
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