Oxford University takes a dislike to Spotify, bans it

Oxford University has taken a fairly drastic measure against music startup Spotify. It’s banned it.

The University’s computing services, OUCS, says the service is using too much bandwidth for their networks to handle. But no warning was given and students are understandably rather annoyed.

Finola Holyoak, a first-year student at Lincoln college says “I was shocked when I realised there was a total ban.”

Given that universities have traditionally been a hotbed of file-sharing (Napster was famously created when Sean Fanning was at college), one might think that Oxford University would want to promote a service that legally allows students to listen to a very large catalogue for free – rather than swapping eachother’s MP3 files.