Oxford itself was quite a hotbed of file sharing. In fact, for a while, we had our very own Gnutella client (called Oxtella). The Gnutella protocol works great when all the machines are on a 100MBit network together.

Then, one day, some hack thought it’d be great to write an article about it in the “Oxford Student” (one of the two major student papers). As a result, OUCS had to move in and block Oxtella, as a public gesture. I’m pretty sure they were ok with it running as long as no one made too much noise about it.

I’m sure the students will find other ways to obtain the music they want to listen to… they always have

Totally understandable. If students are swapping each other’s MP3 files, they’re doing it within the LAN and not using any precious external bandwidth. Universities in this country are notoriously stingy when it comes to this.

How is this remotely newsworthy? Campuses ban software/services all the time if it eats up bandwidth.

Imperial College networks killed off Steam and external P2P use. This is not unusual.

Hmmm, that’s why living off campus is the way to go.

We have had to ban it in our office except on one machine as the amount of outbound bandwidth it uses.

The one machine has had its bandwidth limited so it doesn’t take down the network. Spotify can take our broadband to its knees if its not limited.

Spotify need to limit outbound bandwidth on its clients or at least give us the option to do it ourselves.

It’s news because Spotify has a high valuation and a large institution banning it could affect this. We’re quite a business news focused site, you see.

Fair enough. I pay for the internet connection in my house, so if everybody else was hogging the bandwidth with internet streaming services i’d bann the fkers too.

If they want bandwidth they can bloody well pay for it. Some may argue that these students do in fact pay for that service through their course fees, but i’m sure you will all agree that that right should extend to educational purposes only.

Life’s a bitch kiddies. Deal with it. Buy CD’s.

Makes sense to do this unless the students are contributing a direct fee to the service – pity they can’t compress the bandwidth in some way.

Most people work better with Music around them.

It’s no great surprise that consuming bandwidth at such a large institution would get noticed and promptly shut down. But what about storing your own music in your own cloud (the music you legally own that is) and sharing it with others?

Check out http://www.psonar.com – it’s a new startup that wants you to put your legally-owned music in the cloud, share with others, create playlist (that type of thing) and it’s all free!

Aside from Spotify (which opens a lot of doors to music you may not have heard) with live streaming you can always try your own online storage site.

My company blocked Spotify as well, it just led to people using Grooveshark, which is a browser based clone of Spotify.

Similar things happened in my company. It annoyed me but had to accept it.

Building high speed networks is probably as important as, if not slightly more so, building new roads in the UK now to help our economy remain competitive.

What with the poor state of service that is provided by the 3G network in the UK, the benefits that high speed internet can bring to individuals and organisations are going to be missed if our infrastructure fails to keep up with demand.

That’s a valid comment if they’re using it in academic areas, but if it is also affecting halls, then they usually stick a broadband cost into the rent – such as £10 extra a month (although this does become hidden amongst the usual accommodation costs).

This is not good but I think there will be a solution to this problem.

That is quite a drastic measure by Oxford, and a huge defeat for legal measures of listening to MP3s. But understandably, websites like Spotify DO take up a lot of bandwidth — I’m guessing their execution could’ve been much better than simply just pulling the plug on the service.

For the ones who use Grooveshark, give a try to rockola.fm

Nothing compares to it!

From personal knowledge, Oxford’s mantra is “if it’s P2P, we block it”… this includes BBC iPlayer.

Yeah, Spotify can absolutely cane bandwidth – the P2P part of it can be really quite troublesome.

Shame really, it’s otherwise awesome.

Only, I’ve just pointed out that institutions block services all the time – this is not remotely unprecedented or new.

I mean, Imperial College blocking Steam? Blocking a video games service at a tech university?

Headline stuff, surely.

Students downloading commercial music for pay? that’s absurd! they should be banned.

That’s what tools like QoS are for. If you’re worried about it eating up bandwidth then set some filtering rules to lower the traffic’s priority. Same applies to P2P.

A properly configured network won’t care.

I’m sorry, this is really off the subject but I had to say something… Couldn’t you have spent like two more seconds on the cross on spotify’s logo? It looks like a three yearold drew it

Such an over rated university.

They’ll always remain – behind the curve.

For the record, which UK University’s do actually allow P2P software then without any restrictions?

Students in University are not meant to have fun – They go for learning.. that’s what those uni says.

University of Manchester allow Spotify and Skype but not p2p for other purposes like torrenting, I’m not sure how they differentiate.

Well I have my persnal laptop connected to the wireless network and am running Skype, and on my college PC I am listening to streaming radio via iTunes… all right now

May I point out that Oxford is one of the four most important universities in the world (unlike the one you mention, of which I have never heard)

I wonder how many of them were using the high bitrate feature? That could technically kill bandwidth, even for a school, if enough people used it.

QoS is the exact reason that I can’t figure out why this is a new story.

Imperial’s one of the top Universities actually:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/hybrid.asp?typeCode=438

Higher in the league tables than Oxford

Shame the quotes are so poor here. If it’s a business story, it seems to be disguised as something else. It’s unlikely the University is worried about file-sharing so much as keeping the network working properly.

Classical musical. Yes. Music where the brain follows lyrics. No. Proven repeatedly over and over and over and over and over. There is about an 8-10% drop in learning comprehension.

whatevvvver u say dude. yea while im listing off the top universities in the world.. harvard, oxford, surely the next name is imperial. pff.

Regarding Manchester, if you believe their halls of residence web pages, Spotify is prohibited:

http://hornet.manchester.ac.uk/archives/426

Whether this is enforced, I cannot tell

So you probably mean “instrumental music” – yes. There is quite a lot of “classical” music where lyrics are involved – operas, oratorios, lieder – and quite another chunk of “modern” music where brain does not have to follow lyrics – jazz, soundtracks, electronic…
I personally work great with my selection of Coltrane and Miles Davis…

I can’t actually find any ranking that doesn’t place Imperial equal or higher:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/datablog/2009/oct/08/top-100-universities-world

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/hybrid.asp?typeCode=438

http://i.cs.hku.hk/~tse/topten.html

Spotify is a desktop clone of Grooveshark! Grooveshark is launched since 2007!

[...] VIEW ARTICLE SOURCE [...]

Not really. Spotify is 100% legal, unlike Grooveshark

Just because it’s happened before, doesn’t mean TC shouldn’t be reporting it.

Mike Butcher is right, this could affect Spotify’s value, and is probably of interest to (at the very least) people involved with Spotify, for this reason.

Or are you suggesting that only one robbery in the history of news should ever have been reported, and any subsequent store thefts should have been disregarded because they happen “all the time” ?

[...] Students at Oxford University are understandably nonplussed about the institution’s ham-fisted response to bandwidth problems caused by the widespread use by students of Spotify, the (wonderful) legal music streaming application: a complete ban. [...]

[...] Oxford University Bans Students Using Spotify [...]

[...] Oxfordin yliopisto esti Spotifyn käytön [...]

It’s not really a drastic measure against the startup I guess. When I read the first sentence I was expecting lawsuits and stuff. Blocking sites that consume excessive amounts of bandwidth happens all the time.

How else could they have done it though? Back when I was in high school the administrators never failed to remind students that the use of Internet in school is a privilege, not a right. Although, I really do think they should have notified the students first.

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