Oren’s Weblog

At the file sharing lovefest yesterday, Graham Spannier, President of Penn State University, announced that Penn State has reached an agreement with Roxio to offer unlimited access to the new Napster service to students on campus. The story is here. It will be interesting to see how students like it, and how other campuses either do or don’t follow suit. It will certainly be a good workout of Napster’s (and Microsoft’s) DRM technology.

Educause threw a terrific party last night at Disney’s California Adventure theme park. That California Screamin’ is one hell of a roller coaster ride, and the Soaring Over California is a terrific demonstration of just how good immersive virtual reality can be – there is none of that kind of cognitive dissonance that makes me get queasy on the older motion platform rides like Star Tours at Disneyland.

Fun was had by all, as near as I could see.

Yesterday’s general session on P2P file sharing issues in higher ed, which included luminaries Jack Valenti from the MPAA, Cary Sherman from the RIAA, Graham Spanier from Penn State, and Charles Phelps from University of Rocherster, produced none of the anticipated fireworks.

The panelists, along with moderator Mara Liasson from NPR, did a good job of congratulating each other on the work they’ve accomplished in educating students about the illegality of sharing copyrighted works and how they are open to moving to services which legally allow online distribution of music and film.

There was basically no discussion of any of the difficult issues such as price points, availability, digital rights management, fair use, or first sale doctrine.

While it’s good to know that at least the entertainment industry won’t hold higher ed institutions to blame for being uncooperative, it would’ve been nice to see more frank discussion of the places where we differ. Ah well…another time, perhaps.

I imagine that the video from the event will be made public at this site, though it’s not there as I write this:

http://www.educause.edu/conference/annual/2003/resources.asp

It was great yesterday to see Ken Klingenstein, leader of the Internet 2 Middleware Initiative, get the Educause award for Leadership in Information Technologies. Ken has been a driving force in the profession for many years, and for the last several has been at the center of important and hopefully far-reaching advances in distributed middleware architectures.

Ken’s award-acceptance speech was titled “Noteworthy Failures, Ulysses, and the Heart of Rock and Roll” and was full of characteristically humorous, warm, and penetrating insights as he looked back on his career.

Way to go, Ken!