PUBLISHED...

I did it. I got published in the Wall Street Journal...well, I was quoted in the Wall Street Journal. Which is almost the same thing. Yeah, yeah, just pretty much identical.

Free, Legal and Ignored
Colleges Offer Music Downloads,
But Their Students Just Say No;
Too Many Strings Attached
By NICK TIMIRAOS
July 6, 2006; Page B1
As a student at Cornell University, Angelo Petrigh had access to free online music via a legal music-downloading service his school provided. Yet the 21-year-old still turned to illegal file-sharing programs.

The reason: While Cornell's online music program, through Napster, gave him and other students free, legal downloads, the email introducing the service explained that students could keep their songs only until they graduated. "After I read that, I decided I didn't want to even try it," says Mr. Petrigh, who will be a senior in the fall at the Ithaca, N.Y., school.

Okay, that's not me. I'm a little farther in. But check the whole article for my quote. Who knew that less than 500 students at USC had signed up for their free Crapster? Wow, how the masses have spoken.

Below is a list of quotes I emailed the author of the article and he didn't bite on...sadly. The first few are serious. After that...well, the tone rather devolves.

USC's attempts to offer an alternative to P2P downloading fail, quite simply, because they ignore the students. Since the first time music became available for personal ownership and records could be purchased in stores, individuals have amassed collections of music. Music they owned. Over the decades, no new format altered that model. From LPs to reel-to-reel, cassette tape to CD, music is a commodity, not a service.

With the advent of the digital age, that principle only became more apt. The alternatives to owning one's own music have increased exponentially, with myriad radio stations, earth-bound, satellite and internet. In the past few years, subscription music services have only added to the range of options. And yet, surprise, surprise, people still want to have a music collection. Music listeners like owning their music, not renting, nor facing the possibility of their collection suddenly disappearing if they (or their university) no longer pays a monthly fee.

The failing of USC, then, is not one of Mac vs. PC or one service as opposed to another. It's in the principle. The evil ostensibly being fought (illegal downloading) is unmistakable evidence of the demand for personal ownership of music. The school responded, as many have foolishly done, by offering an alternative that is utterly unrelated to the problem.

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Of course, all this highfalutin argumentation overlooks the obvious: the only people using Napster or Ruckus are cud-chewing nimrods. They are terrible services that exist largely because university administrators with tapioca for brains continue to ignore the fact that Napster and similar services are riding the muddy river to the bottom of the toilet and will soon be flushed from the market by the sure hand of consumers. But, since the administrators don't actually use these services, they wouldn't know that.

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I couldn't really make any argument to any USC administrator who approved a program like this. It would be like talking to a jack-o-lantern in December. Watching the pumpkin juice dribble from the ears would just gross me out.

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And just in case you need 'em, you can quote me as describing the ISD (Information Services Division) people as:
"mentally incompetent"
"waste of a soul"
"the human version of Cream of Wheat"
"wanna-be Cro-Magnons"
"useful...as a doormat"
"excellent urine receptacles"
"having impeccable credentials among the professionally retarded"
"defective -- return to Walmart"
"unworthy to be part of the genus homo"
"I pity the womb you emerged from"
"failed experiments in animating lifeless organic material"