On Wednesday, everyone on campus got an e-mail again informing us of the “free & legal” Ruckus music service, which claims to grant students access to over three million songs online.
Wouldn’t that be great? Really, I probably try Ruckus every time we get one of these e-mails.
The problem is, it doesn’t even work. You can’t just go to the site and download songs, but must download the Ruckus Media Player…which after at least several years of existence still supports neither Mac OS X nor Windows Vista. I can’t quote any statistics, but given how many MacBooks and new PCs you see around campus, this clearly excludes an enormous segment of the population.
The bottom line with piracy is, so long as it’s easier to get free music illegally, that will be what people do. Even forcing users to download another unnecessary program is enough to keep many people from using the service — especially if that program helps limit what we can do with the downloaded music, which I’ve heard is the case. But how would I know? I don’t own a copy of Windows XP. I don’t even know what the Ruckus player looks like.
Why are we patronizing a company that can’t even be bothered to support what are soon to be the two primary operating systems on campus?
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