As of this week, students can read news and features on www.napster.com while visiting the site from NU’s network, but they cannot view message boards or download files. It is unclear exactly when the site became accessible.
NU’s Information Security Coordinator Roger Safian said Wednesday he was not aware NU students could log on to Napster’s home page.
Safian said NU continues to block many IP addresses that link to Napster Web pages, in accordance with NU’s decision last winter to stop students from downloading music from Napster’s site.
“We haven’t made any changes,” Safian said. “Napster has.”
A Napster spokeswoman said users overloaded their servers this fall, causing them to crash from excessive traffic. Napster added a number of new servers with additional IP addresses to allow for more traffic, she said, renewing access to NU users this week.
She said many people falsely believe Napster added new IP addresses to increase its number of users, but that the new IP addresses actually helped free up the overwhelmed servers.
NU students have been prevented from logging onto Napster’s home page since Dec. 29, 1999. Information Technology officials said at the time that NU cut off access because Napster users tied up more than 20 percent of the university’s network.
IT officials also cited concerns about copyright infringement liability when they ended network access to Napster’s home page.
Napster is facing several legal challenges from recording labels and music groups who say the site illegally distributes their music without permission.
A U.S. district judge granted an injunction in July against Napster that would have forced the site to shut down, but Napster won an appeal three days later.
In October, Napster formed an alliance with German music giant Bertelsmann, BMG’s parent company, that compensated the recording company for swapped files. With several lawsuits pending against Napster, company officials have said more alliances may be formed to keep the site running.
Napster’s home page says the company plans to charge users a monthly fee – between $3 and $10 – for the file-sharing service, which will begin this summer.
NU students have used other music servers to download their MP3 music files since the university blocked Napster’s home page last year. Audiogalaxy.com and iMesh.com have been popular alternative servers.
Speech freshman Rachel Sockut said at the beginning of this school year she tried to download files from Napster but was blocked.
“I would have loved to use Napster because a lot of my friends at other schools use it and were happy with it,” Sockut said.
She said she now uses Audiogalaxy instead.
“Even if Napster becomes available, I would probably use it as a second source for my downloading because Audiogalaxy has proven itself,” Sockut said.
Safian said IT officials will examine whether the new access affects traffic before taking any action to limit NU visitors to Napster’s home page.
