p2p news / p2pnet: Stanford University is going the whole hog in its commercial partnership with Apple.

Unlikely as it may seem, the university is actively touting iTunes on Apple’s behalf, using named students as copy fodder.

"When Stanford University graduate David Sellinger arrived on campus last month for reunion weekend, he was too busy to attend a talk by one of his favorite history professors," says CNET News. "But thanks to a pilot program the university recently launched, called Stanford on iTunes, Sellinger didn’t have to miss much. Stanford on iTunes’ debut, in late October, marked the first time a university made audio content from lectures, interviews, commencement speeches and the like publicly available through a system like the iTunes Music Store."

But to be fair, it’s doing much the same for Yahoo’s music downloans. The scheme means students must provide Yahoo with invaluable data such as their creditr card numbers, in return for which they’re enlisted into a ‘free’ service. But the service stops being free when students leave the school and Stanford doesn’t say if they’ll have to consciously opt out if they want the ’service’ to stop.

Penn started the rot when it became the first senior university to fall in with entertainment industry plans to turn schools across the US into marketing outlets with staff acting both as sales persons and industry cops.

The RIAA and MPAA maintain the farce through their Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities.

In the meanwhile, "While Stanford is the first university to use iTunes as a tool for the public distribution of content, several other schools have been utilizing Apple’s technology to get content to students and faculty for some time," CNET states.

"Duke University became the first when, in the fall of 2004, the school gave 1,600 iPod music players, preloaded with orientation materials, to first-year students. Now, the school plans to incorporate iPods into classes throughout the university as a way of storing class materials for use any time and anywhere.

"Other institutions, including Brown University, the University of Michigan’s School of Dentistry and Stanford itself have partnered with Apple and are using iTunes as a way to distribute class content to students. In addition, the University of Washington has started a pilot program for podcasting lectures for future use by students."

Any number of well known US (and other) schools specialise in conceiving and developing hardware and software solutions as part of their curricula. But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of the schools dragooned into acting as entertainment industry shills to have worked with each other under what would have been mutually beneficial (in a number of senses) cooperative ventures.

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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win
- Mohandas Gandhi

Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local political representatives. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance.

See:-
actively touting – Sad day for Stanford U, October 14, 2005
CNET News – Stanford using iTunes to take lectures global, November 4, 2005
started the rot – Big Music university shill report, September 21, 2005

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 5th, 2005 at 8:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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