As much as I'd like to buy into what these students are saying, the arguments they're using don't hold any water at all. Note that PSU is only one letter removed from
PCU and I don't think that's a coincidence. Chances are on any given day, if you walk around the campus, you'll find a dozen different groups protesting something. In this case, they're upset that a portion of their Information Technology Fee is going towards the Napster service, which a minority of students will use. Which is true. But that can be said about anything that was purchased with that fee. A very small portion of the students have access to some of the Comp Sci laboratories, yet the money comes from the fee paid by all students. There are always things that are of limited audience that all come out of the tuition and fees... How is this different?
Yes, in this case, the money is going to Napster, and I guess a portion is indirectly going to the RIAA. You're not going to see me defending the RIAA, but at the same time, the filehsaring problem on campuses really does eat up bandwidth, which on the whole probably costs the school as much as what this Napster contract costs them (though Penn State doesn't have an open budget, so who knows.)
My problem is not with the students objecting to Napster (which I would too if I was still there) but the shoddy reasoning they're using. They should really attack this issue from a different angle than "I'm paying for something I won't use."
