Ruckus allows students to be legal when downloading music
by Emily Schmidt, posted March 17, 2008
Music downloading has become a serious problem in the past decade. Even though iTunes has created a legal way to download music, for a small fee of 99 cents per song, sites such as Bearshare, Aries, Limewire and Kazaa have lured some students into a life of crime.
A CNN article published in August 2007 claims this is no small problem. The recording industry plans to start suing student offenders.
Illegal music downloading includes downloading music from any of the above mentioned sites or through copying CDs.
“I used to download music, but I realized how bad it was,” said freshman Mark Reeves.
The University of Missouri is trying to steer away from these issues with a program they encourage for student use called Ruckus.
“The benefit of using Ruckus is that it is legal,” said Travis of the MU IT Help Desk. “In the past, MU had a problem with illegal music downloading and sharing. Most of these downloading and sharing problems have been cut off, and to lessen the complaints, we offer a program to download music available for student use.”
Ruckus is not very well known on campus, even though it is publicized through the freshman and transfer pamphlets sent to potential students.
“Ruckus eliminates copyright infringement through its licensing agreements with all of the major international record labels, as well as thousands of independent labels and artists,” according to the MU Web site.
Ruckus is a service for college students. Any student with a valid @mizzou.edu e-mail address can access this music.
“All you have to do is subscribe to the site and start downloading,” Travis said. “It is similar to other downloading platforms, and is 100 percent completely legal to use. What’s more, the MU campus actually has a Ruckus server locally. It’s called, MOREnet (Missouri Research and Education Network) and it allows faster downloading on campuses to use Ruckus.”
But why are students so unaware that this service is available for them?
“I didn’t really know about Ruckus,” freshman Dexter Patton said. “No one in my res hall does [know about it]. I went by Tiger Tech to get a computer problem fixed and they told me about it. It works really well and I like it.”
The only issue with Ruckus is the operating system it uses. Mizzou is both a PC and Mac campus, but Ruckus only works on the PC. Ruckus will never be available for Mac or Apple because Ruckus fears Apple will use their data for research purposes. Because all of the Mac users are left out, MU is researching other platforms for music downloading.
Nonetheless, if you are a Windows user and download music, Ruckus may suit your needs.
If you have any questions about Ruckus, call the IT Help Desk at 573-882-5000 or visit them online.
