From Napster to WinMX to Kazaa and back again, NIU students living in Grant Towers will have a new, legal way to download music and movies starting in fall 2004.

Ruckus Network and NIU Information Technology Services are working together to make free music and video downloads available to students next semester.

Vince Han, CEO and co-founder of Ruckus, said Ruckus allows students to access a variety of music and movie titles, along with local content, without having to worry about copyright infringement. The service will offer CD-quality songs, much like Apple’s iTunes Music Store and Napster 2.0.

NIU’s pilot agreement with Ruckus will be available to students living in Grant Towers beginning in August. Lincoln, Douglas and Neptune Halls’ DSL connections currently aren’t able to support the high-speed transfers, said Cindy Phillips, director of NIUTEL.

“We are in the process of upgrading the remaining halls, starting in the summer of 2005, to ethernet,” Phillips said.

The files on Ruckus will not be MP3s. Instead, they will be Windows Media files that are encoded with a DRM. DRM stands for digital rights management and prevents downloaded files from being illegally copied, Han said.

The advantages of Ruckus over using other file-sharing programs is that all Ruckus files are stored locally on the NIU network, Han said. The advantage of storing files locally is faster download speeds.

For ITS, Ruckus has the potential to solve illegal downloading problems two-fold.

ITS receives an average of 40 to 50 cease and desist orders each month but has had some months where it received hundreds of orders saying users on the network are illegally transporting copyrighted files.

“File sharing and copyright infringement is something that was hurting higher education because their bandwidth for education or administrative use was being sucked up by illegal activity,” Phillips said.

ITS hopes Ruckus will alleviate costs incurred by cease and desist orders and administrative action taken on students, Phillips said.

ITS will underwrite the costs of the pilot for the first two semesters and then evaluate a need for Ruckus at NIU, she said.

“We will evaluate and see if this is something that interests students as an entertainment option,” Phillips said.

If there is no need for the service after the first year, ITS is not bound to continue anything with Ruckus Network, she said. If ITS continues its partnership with Ruckus, students will have to pay for the service.