• Ars Technica, Friday, October 10, 2008 12:01 PM

As if there weren't enough companies starting their own music or movie download services, a new study shows a surprising new competitor in the field: colleges and universities. According to the latest Educause survey, a full 15% of US schools are already offering campus-sponsored music or movie download services. Another 17% either have plans to implement such a service or are "considering" it.

The reason? These schools are tying to avoid the legal fallout from students using their computer labs to illegally download such content. A torrent of pre-litigation letters from the Recording Industry Association of America seems to have spurred the trend, though it's unclear how effective they are. Students continue to use peer-to-peer download services, largely because the university-run download services are simply inferior.

The good news is that enough universities are apparently providing high-speed broadband access to make the problem possible. According to the study, among schools with residence halls, 97.9% offered high-speed connections to students. And those connections are fast--85% of them are greater than 10Mbps, and 44% are 100Mbps or faster.

Read the whole story at Ars Technica »