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As colleges and universities gear up for the imminent return of students after Labor Day, we're starting to see a raft of stories on various measures taken in response to the flood of music downloading. In some cases, the flood is literal, with estimates of up to 90% of university network traffic being consumed by P2P applications. In other cases, it's a social flood, with file sharing having become "ingrained" into the culture. And over all hangs the omnipresent Cartel jihad that has, so far, sued 158 individuals at 35 colleges. The schools want to avoid legal liability, control excessive bandwidth usage, but not engender revolts. As a results we're seeing a variety of experiments going on. Some schools have signed agreements with services like the reborn Napster 2.0 to allow legal downloading. Students may pay a la carte, by monthly subscription, or by annual/semester fees, depending their school's particular deal. Some colleges have developed or deployed bandwidth-throttling software, some of which target specific ports or sites used by popular P2P programs such as Kazaa. Of course, the big question is whether any of this will have an effect on the file-trading culture itself. It's clear that the talking head "just say no" approach has failed miserably. Some pundits are asserting that the current crop of trials will not have any effect (e.g. Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne) but I'm less sure. College remains a time of experimentation and learning for students and many cultural patterns are learned, shaped, and changed. To the extent that colleges offer clear alternatives behaviors that fit well with students' lifestyles and desires behaviors can change and do change. It's entirely possible that, four years from now, we'll have tens of thousands of new graduates who think it's perfectly reasonable to pay a few dollars a month to subscribe to music services just the way they subscribe to cable TV or cell phone services now.
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