Ruckus bites the dust
p2pnet news view | RIAA News:- In yet another blow to the corporate music industry, Ruckus, know by some as Fuckus, the RIAA-touted ‘independent’ corporate music service designed to shoehorn ‘product’ into American schools, is no more.
Visitors to the site now see the graphic on the right, and Michael Castello, director of student initiatives, Student Government Association, and USMSC representative at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, wonders if p2pnet readers might have a few ideas for a replacement.
Telling p2pnet about the happy event, “Ruckus music is shutting down for good (along with its DRM servers),” he says. “What’s particularly interesting about this one is that they inked deals with taxpayer-funded university systems, like the University System of Maryland, to unilaterally promote their service.
“Basically, we as students paid for it whether we liked it or not.”
Castello has spoken out against these kinds of schemes, and Ruckus in particular, more than once.
In 2007 he wrote »»»
There has been some talk recently about Ruckus, a subscription-based service that has struck a deal with the UMD system to provide its content to students “free” of charge (student tuition and fees notwithstanding). Services like this one continue to be lauded as the “legal alternative to downloading”, and indeed this particular incarnation has been endorsed by SGA.
However, services like this one come up short in some key areas which is why to the music enthusiast or serious downloader, they will never compare to what is available on torrent trackers.
- Music can only be played via their software, not your music player of choice and not on your operating system of choice.
- While there is considerable selection, it is nowhere near complete and nowhere near what is available on elite music trackers.
- The DRM-laden songs prevent transfer to a portable music device, like my iPod. Even if you do use software to (illegally) remove the DRM, the files are not .mp3 but .wma, a format that is not compatible with iPods.
- Even after going through all the trouble of freeing the songs, they are still in poor quality. If you decide to transcode to .mp3 to put the songs on an iPod, your quality will go down even further. The final blow to this model is that using programs like SoundTaxi or TuneBite (programs that actually charge you to use them!) to remove the DRM from these songs is illegal. If one is going to be operating in this gray area anyway, why not just go for the best and get high quality, usable music via bittorrent and torrent trackers?
Now, “the Ruckus business model has been doomed for some time, and I’m currently working with administrators both at UMBC and across the Maryland system to move toward something that’s more similar to the EFF’s Voluntary Collective Licensing model,” he told p2pnet, adding:
“It is my belief, and perhaps your commenters would be willing to weigh in, that students would be willing to pay a reasonable fee (say, $5/month, which would be roughly $20/semester) to have free access to music via whatever method they want, be BitTorrent, LimeWire, or any other popular sharing services. The collected money would be distributed among artists based on popularity.”"
February , 2009
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February 9th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
I initially felt sad, then I realized on reading the article that it was a different Ruckus that has died. I was thinking of the one on The Boondocks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Ruckus
February 9th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
ruckus wasn’t too shabby. I mean… it was a buggy mess, but coupled with tunebite, it was actually a pretty efficient way to get tracks safely on campus.