Over 180,000
students in Tennessee can rest easy knowing they will not be slapped with an RIAA music tax thanks to the Tennessee Board of Regents. The group rejected the idea of slapping students with a mandatory fee for the Napster music download service. The fee would have kept the RIAA away from 45 schools represented by the board but added to costs of university fees. The board decided that 99c per student a month was not reasonable and not worth it to solve a very insignificant problem of illegally downloaded music. Without this deal schools who sign up in Tennessee will not get as good a deal as the University of Rochester which is subsidised by RIAA but the Tennessee board don't really care as the money they saved can go to better education and other more important problems. As pointed out by The Register students want better education not where Britney spears next vacation will be.
|  More than 180,000 students will be free of a Napster/RIAA music tax thanks to the Tennessee Board of Regents.The group has rejected a proposal to slap students with a mandatory fee for the Napster music download service. The agreement with Napster would have kept the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) off the backs of the 45 schools represented by the Tennessee Board of Regents but add to already massive uni costs.
Despite bullying by the RIAA, Tennessee has decided that a $ 9.99 per student/per month fee is too high a price to pay to solve a not terribly important problem."The mandatory  fee that was part of the Tennessee plan, coupled with the perception that illegal downloading doesn"t pose a specific problem for the schools, prompted system officials to table the idea, said Bob Adams, the Regents" vice chancellor for business and finance," according to the Associated Press. So far, not a single school that we are aware of has agreed to pay full price for a music download service, as an option to push students away from downloading copyrighted files on peer-to-peer networks. |
You can get the full story over at The Register. As usual the RIAA tries to bully schools into signing up for services that they don't really require. Schools want to spend money on extra educational facilities and books and as pointed out IT costs will go up if students are made to sign up to these services. Of course wasting money on music downloading services is not going to get the student the best education is it?
Source: The Register
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At the RIAA's pace, we should be able to start an accurate countdown of the days left til they fall flat on their face. They just don't get it. Supporting a failing business model and going about change all the wrong way will only send them failing faster. FREE THE MUSIC
for once the board of regents have done something RIGHT!
as a student down here - its about time they got off there corporate/beaurocratic a$$es and did something for us [students] rather than just giving us another fee; we currently have [technology fee, printing fee (which as of end of the semester now adds per-printing charge ontop of a semesterly fee), campus fee, "clean fuels fee", among others that i have forgotten ALL ON TOP OF TUITION (not to mention that some classes (labs) have another added "facility FEE")
freonchill -they need all that money for the football team!! 
It's about time someone did something about all these rising education costs. It is horrible.
I wonder how long till the RIAA does a raid because the protection money was not paid.
