Grant Hall residents will be testing a new product for NIU this fall when they download music and movies from the Ruckus Network online music and movie service.

The pilot program will allow about 1,500 students to download movies and music free of direct charges. If the downloading service works well in its test, the service may be expanded to other residence halls.

NIU has tried to educate students about stopping the illegal downloading of music and movies while the telecommunications system was altered so access could not be attained so easily, said Cindy Phillips, director of NIU telecommunications.

“ITS could just ignore this, but we are in the education business,” Phillips said.

The network should avoid lawsuits by offering only properly licensed media on a local NIU server. With the server on campus, NIU will save bandwidth that otherwise would have been used to download the large movie and music files.

Ruckus contacted Phillips when the company came across an article discussing the problems that NIU was having with students illegally downloading copyrighted material.

The budding company offers local content with movies and music, Phillips said.

Phillips went to Student Housing and Dining Services for suggestions as to which residence hall should be used for the pilot test. It was decided that the services should be limited so that evaluations of the system could be done accurately.

Grant and Stevenson Towers came as the top choices because they were the two halls with Ethernet, Phillips said. Grant was chosen in the end.

The price to NIU for the test service will be about $20 per subscriber, Phillips said.

The figure is tentative because Ruckus is still negotiating with music and movie companies for licensing.

Negotiations with the entertainment industry are a never-ending process, Ruckus co-founder David Galper said.

There is great interest and demand for legal online downloading services, Galper said.

It was this interest that led Galper and co-founder Vince Han to make the blueprints for Ruckus while they were graduate students at MIT.

The Residence Hall Association has been appointed as the advisory and editorial committees that will work with marketing and deploying Ruckus.

RHA will have full control over the file sharing program next year if it is expanded.

Ruckus remains in steady contact with the RHA, speaking with them on a weekly basis, said Brad Williams, Ruckus director of product marketing.

RHA has become the intermediary between Ruckus and the students, keeping the network informed of student interests and concerns, he said.

Ruckus is also running pilot tests at several other institutions, but no one interviewed would release the names of those institutions.