Indiana University Reinstates Napster...Temporarily

In a suprise move by university officials, the popular MP3 search program Napster will be reinstated after being blocked for more than a month. Indiana's student newspaper, the IDS, reported that the servers will be reopened for two weeks beginning this Saturday at 6 a.m. Indiana and Napster worked in conjunction to develop a new method to lower network traffic that permits the downloading of multimedia files, which will be used in this trial period.

This new method will allow users to search as normal, then internally locate the requested file as close to campus as possible.

Policy officer for University Information Technology Services Mark Bruhn stated, "The outbound traffic should be reduced because searches will start with their local network, so if we can keep a portion of the traffic on local connection then the Internet connection will not come into play."

Indiana Universtiy Sophomore Chad Paulson, webmaster of SaveNapster.com, which houses the latest information concerning Napster bans across the United States as well as a petition to rescue the service, told BetaNews "I see this as IU covering their bases, an after-the-fact thing. They realized they screwed up, and they want to come to terms with the issue and solve it instead of blocking it."

He then went on to state, "the next step is informing and educating students to make them responsible, so that they proceed with caution," to ensure the service stays and is not banned after the two-week trial period.

The university will be publishing its regulatory technique in a formal draft on April 11, available at bestpath.iu.edu/internetdraft.txt for the public to examine.

Indiana University will be working with other universities in the future, and encouraging them to follow suit and use the new method to bring Napster back to campuses.

For more information concerning Napster, visit Napster.com or visit Paulson's site at SaveNapster.com.