Why colleges can’t stop piracy

The RIAA and MPAA are always knocking on dorm room doors (not literally of course) to sue students for downloading content. It is a quick way for them to make a couple bucks (you’d think they do this enough by robbing the artist of the work) and a great way to ruin a college student’s life…but what do they care?

Colleges do care however, unfortunately their approach is a lost cause.

I got an email from my college, Towson University, with a service called Ctrax which is a legal music download website that is free for all students.

I appreciate Towson’s effort to keep their students away from the terrible fines of the corrupt organizations, but Ctrax is a joke.

The Problems

1. No Mac support - Right off the bat I knew this program would not support OS X, and I was right. After all, 99% of students use iTunes to play their music, why should they support the company that created this program?
2. Firefox incompatible - Even above not supporting Macintosh Ctrax requires Internet Explorer, that nice safe browser, to play and download these tracks. Hilarious.
3. iPod compatibility? - For those that do venture into using this service they will face a nice little challenge when they want to add their file to iTunes. It turns out the files are .wma, so they have to burn them to a CD and import the track into iTunes. Convenient.
4. Windows Media - If you do have a Windows Machine and use IE (not only am I sorry), you have to play the files in the wretched Windows Media player. Hello 1998.

Like I said, I appreciate the effort but lets actually try to stop piracy. A normal college student is going to look at this, laugh, then download what they want a-la Bit Torrent (not that I am saying that is right).

If only someone who had any clue what was going on in technology would take action, then we would not have the RIAA suing poor college students into oblivion. Why not try to work out a deal with Apple, despite DRM, if I could pay 75 cents a track, $1.50 for shows I would be all over that. Oh well. I will stick with paying .99 cents a song, and have my collection tied down to my machine (or 5).